Among many challenges, individuals working in healthcare often face tight budgets and limited resources. This is frequently combined with a call to find ways to cut the continuous rise in the cost of patient care.
Faced with these barriers, hospital administrators must decrease costs while maintaining or improving the patient experience (Facility Executive).
Facility managers often play a key role in adhering to financial constraints, allowing providers to continue meeting the needs of those who inhabit the facilities.
These facility managers’ knowledge, relationships, creativity, and resourcefulness all aid in ensuring a reasonable cost and a positive patient care experience.
Consolidate Systems to Better Inform Decisions
Typical facility costs include external maintenance, electrical systems, mechanical systems (i.e. HVAC, chillers, boilers), building maintenance, interior signage, roadways and sidewalks, and more. Every work order begins with the existing or built condition. That may or may not be the case, especially for facilities that are aging or have undergone numerous renovations and modifications over the years. Thus, institutional knowledge is spread over many systems, across many computers and servers, or still in its original form. Most likely, all of these, resulting in information gaps or extended time researching finding it. Delays in work order communication or completion can prove detrimental in many ways, including exposure to increasing prices, which can result in lower patient care experiences.
In such a high-stakes and fast-paced setting, facility managers must clearly communicate and deliver quality and complete facility information to quickly perform their work order tasks. Many hospitals have relied on digital tools to communicate efficiently in real-time.
Maintain Records of Valuable Facility Knowledge
When witnessing hospitals that have seamlessly transitioned to digital information tools, it is clear that intimate knowledge of facilities has significant benefits. In addition, close relationships with contractors built through years of experience also plays an important part. Combine all of this with the likelyhood that more employees will retire or leave a position, taking with them much of the institutional knowledge that they have gained.
If workers possessing crucial project or facility knowledge leave a position or cannot come to work, projects must often be delayed.
In an era that demands innovation to sustain cost and efficiency, managers can incorporate digital applications to maintain facility records and document expert technician processes, ensuring that routine maintenance continues and projects meet deadlines.
Utilize Digital Resources
Easy-to-use software applications, such as eFacility, can be seamlessly incorporated into a facility management plan to meet the diverse and ever-changing needs and goals of a facility.
eFacility enables an entire team to have access to all of the facility information from anywhere, no matter who is present.
In incorporating this application, users gain visibility and control over where and how to complete work orders, enabling them to respond faster in real-time to meet both anticipated and unexpected needs. Consequently, this increased efficiency and productivity lead to decreased costs.
Allowing eFacility to lift some of the weight of communication and store the detailed knowledge of facilities leaves more room for administrators and managers to innovate in any given situation.
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If you need to consolidate your systems to decrease facility maintenance costs in your healthcare facility, submit the form below.
References
Baker, Brian & Bryan Connor. (2021). Healthcare FM Resiliency. FMJ – IFMA. January/February. from http://fmj.ifma.org/publication/?m=30261&i=689095&view=articleBrowser&article_id=3852276
Facility Executive. (2018, June 20). Five Trends in Healthcare Affecting Facility Management. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from https://facilityexecutive.com/2018/06/five-trends-healthcare-affecting-facility-management/
