Can physical environment big data make a big difference in your hospital?

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Today’s healthcare facility managers face a myriad of challenges. As budgets and headcount shrinks, they are being asked to do more with less. This includes addressing variable operating expenses, managing a knowledge gap as new technologies come online, and generally dealing with the issues incurred with aging buildings and ensuring compliance with an ever-changing and growing body of standards and regulations.

By understanding the data at their fingertips, facility managers can uncover many advantages. By harnessing big data, you can correct root-cause energy inefficiencies to drive operational value.

One of the highest impact strategies to improve a building’s operations is integration of previously disparate systems. By implementing an integrated BMS that acts as a universal translator, all the components and systems within a building, regardless of what protocol they natively speak, can be monitored, managed and controlled from a centralized point. Information from outside the building, such as weather data and utility costs, can also be integrated via Web Services. This much more efficient process ensures the optimization of critical building functions, including fire safety, HVAC, lighting, and energy metering.

Integration of systems is also changing how stakeholders are managing their buildings. Building owners and managers now have access to real-time data from across their building’s systems. This not only greatly reduces the time it takes to diagnose and fix issues, this centralized integration also delivers new visibility into how a building’s systems are working together, providing opportunities to improve and optimize overall operations. It is also much easier to see trends that indicate best practices or areas for improvement – something that would be impossible if all systems are being managed individually.

The next step is interpreting the massive amounts of data generated by the BMS. Analytics make it possible to automatically track energy and equipment use, identify faults, provide analysis and prioritize opportunities for improvement based on cost, comfort and maintenance impact.

That should give you a good starting point for thinking about leveraging data. In my next post, we’ll take a closer look at bringing your analytics strategy to life. Have you used analytics, if so how has it helped you make sense of data? Let us know in the comments below.