Healthcare facilities are fighting an uphill battle

The world is experiencing a quickly aging population, with the number of people 65+ expected to reach 1.5 billion in 2050. With an estimated 12.9M healthcare worker shortage by 2035, it will be difficult for healthcare organizations to meet this demand.

Meeting this challenge depends on having robust healthcare facility infrastructures. The medical staff needs to focus on taking care of their patients with the confidence that important areas like operating rooms and intensive care units are running safely, reliably, and cybersecure.

Keeping up with facility management is becoming more difficult with shrinking resources. Many FM teams also have a broader scope of responsibilities, including:

• Sustainability: Facility teams are expected to find new ways to reduce their carbon footprint in support of the commitment of countries and health professionals to the COP26 Health Programme.
• Resilience. COVID showed how important it is for hospitals to be agile and resilient. Beyond pandemics, facilities now also need to be resilient against the disruption of severe weather-related events. At the same time, facilities must maintain safety compliance while facing reliability risks due to aging equipment, increasingly complex, power-sensitive infrastructures, complex maintenance requirements, and more frequent cyberattacks.

Facility teams often don’t have the time – or, in some cases, the in-house expertise – to keep up with these new demands. Expert services can empower FM teams to meet all of these challenges.

Digital services augment and extend facility management capabilities

Combining the newest digital technologies and connected experts enables comprehensive support for healthcare facility teams.

It all starts with smart infrastructure.

An IoT-enabled power and building management platform helps future-proof facilities by supporting data-driven decisions.

By connecting with digital services, experts monitor your facilities 24/7 using advanced analytics to identify areas for optimization (e.g., energy efficiency, costs, decarbonization) while helping to avoid risks to your infrastructure.

The remote expert team can guide your onsite FM team with recommended actions before a failure occurs. If an issue occurs, time to repair is reduced using powerful root cause analysis. Your personnel can take these actions without needing a site visit from a field services team.

Greater connectivity also provides remote access to your facilities, which can help improve your team’s efficiency, even when access is limited. And advanced asset analytics enables the transition to predictive maintenance, reducing maintenance activities by up to 40% while improving equipment reliability and lifespan.

Of course, you’ll want to choose the right partner to get the most from digital services.

Expertise in supporting the entire facility lifecycle

Schneider Electric offers an integrated and comprehensive range of digital services and expertise in each healthcare facility domain – from power and building systems to data centers, cybersecurity, microgrid, and more. Services span the entire facility lifecycle – from design and build to operation and maintenance – with asset management for all equipment and systems, to help you achieve your goals efficiently.

Whether building, upgrading, or expanding, our local healthcare solutions architects will consult your design firm to ensure compliance with all safety regulations. They understand healthcare regulations in each region to help you simplify regulatory compliance.

We then help support you in the operation and maintenance of your facilities. Our EcoStruxure solutions for Healthcare help make your facilities future-ready, digitizing and connecting your important assets. We will audit and recommend cost-effective methods to connect meters, sensors, or other devices or equipment. This connectivity will collect all critical data from across your enterprise and send it to the cloud. Our connected experts then analyze that big data, using AI and machine learning to uncover opportunities and risks to help you take action.

This combination of connectivity and digital services can help reduce your operating costs by up to 50% and electrical failures by up to 75%.

Tailor digital services to your needs, adapting easily to support the evolution of your resources. And with an EcoStruxure Service Plan, you can combine the power of digital services with local field services for responsive resolution and repairs. It doesn’t matter what mix of brands and technologies you have in your facility – we can support all your systems in a simple, unified way.

Digital services and analytics deliver a fast ROI

Investing in digital services can have a fast return, and the savings realized from performance improvements can far outweigh the cost. For example, our ESP power management service can increase system uptime by 20% and avoid capital spending by 30%.

In addition, we help ensure that connectivity to assets is delivered with high data quality that you can trust. This is important when deciding to improve power quality, minimize downtime, extend asset life, improve energy efficiency, and reduce CO₂ emissions.

For example, the University of Rochester Medical Center in the USA has been using EcoStruxure Asset Advisor and EcoStruxure Power Monitoring Expert to gain deeper insights into equipment conditions and enable predictive maintenance for over 26,000 pieces of equipment. The solution identified earlier an equipment anomaly to address. The university’s facility team responded by placing an advance order for a replacement. This was one of two events for which digital services and analytics saved the university $1 million, an ROI of 20 times.

The extensive high-quality data collected also helps monitor and analyze power quality throughout the facility’s electrical system to protect further the reliable operation of sensitive medical equipment like dialysis and MRI machines.

This article appeared in Schneider Electric and has been published here with permission.