While your FM professionals are experts in keeping your facilities operating, they may not have access to ongoing training to keep pace with new technologies and approaches that could help improve facilities performance, reduce cost and risk, and benefit patients. In addition, learning and career development opportunities can make a difference in FM talent retention and recruitment.

Upskilling is especially important when it comes to preventative maintenance strategies. Preventative, or reliability-focused, maintenance can reduce unplanned equipment failures by 17%, in turn reducing energy and maintenance costs by as much as 30%. Unlike calendar-based maintenance, preventative maintenance involves using sophisticated technologies to monitor refrigerators, imaging machines and other equipment so the FM team can prevent costly emergency repairs and replacements.

In highly decentralized FM operations, a training program can help instill system-wide standards for operations, service delivery and facility quality to provide a consistent brand experience for patients.

Investing in FM technologies and training staff to embrace them will enable you to leverage your facilities data to improve building operations and optimize the ROI of your FM technology.

Where facilities compliance is concerned, leading practice is to always be prepared for a visit from The Joint Commission or other accrediting or regulatory authority. However, it’s far more likely that compliance and accreditation preparation is a time-limited initiative. When the inspection date approaches, the FM team will focus on remediating items most likely to receive attention, while also juggling daily service requests.

Meanwhile, documentation of compliance activities is often available only in large paper binders, perhaps maintained by a single building engineer. Should that person retire or move to another organization, responding to regulatory inquiries will be very difficult and time-consuming.

Leading practice is to adopt always-on compliance and digitized compliance documentation that is accessible on a mobile device by authorized users. Ideally, the FM team will make regular rounds of key equipment and facility areas and maintain an always-current digital record of compliance-related checks. With the right tools and training, preparing for inspection authorities can simply become part of the daily routine for the FM staff.

Vendor management is often a hidden source of potential savings for a healthcare organization. Often, FM procurement is managed at the facility level, making it difficult to understand total facilities vendor spend for the organization. Centralizing procurement will empower FMs to better manage their budgets.

For example, depending on the scope of your facilities network, your organization may be using 15 or 16 different vendors for janitorial, landscaping and other services or supplies. Pricing and performance standards may vary widely, and it may be difficult to compare cost and quality of vendor services across the organization.

Leading practice is to consolidate the supplier network into a vetted group of the most qualified, high-quality suppliers. Then your FM team can negotiate volume discount pricing to reduce costs across all of your facilities. In addition, your FM team can adopt a mobile CMMS that includes supplier management functionality, enabling a team member to alert a vetted vendor when work is needed, and track the project from work order through vendor payment and budget tracking.

Typically, about one-third of the energy used by buildings is wasted through inefficient or malfunctioning equipment. Wasted energy can be significant in healthcare facilities that house energy-intensive diagnostic and treatment equipment.

Leading practice is to apply next-generation preventative maintenance techniques with sophisticated monitoring tools to keep equipment operating efficiently and to prevent failures. These measures not only extend equipment life and help ensure that the patient is always safe and comfortable, but also significantly reduce energy costs.

With the growing sophistication of smart building technologies, FMs can take energy efficiency and sustainability to new levels. By automatically capturing data related to energy and water usage, as well as waste management, an FM team can create benchmarks for tracking sustainability goals over time.

Case Study: 

JLL’s Performance Optimization Program allows hospitals and healthcare systems to create a vision, roadmap and detailed plan, supported by change management, to infuse their in-house FM teams with new skills, business processes and FM technologies, ensuring no jobs are outsourced or eliminated. One large healthcare organization implemented POP after several adverse facilities-related events jeopardized the system’s reputation. The Initial assessment identified and prioritized $6.7 million in savings opportunities, including savings of $1.5 million in procurement, $0.9 million in energy, $3.3 million in operations and $1 million in labor. In addition to cost savings, the POP resulted in fewer and less severe Joint Commission findings, elevated FM staff performance and capabilities, and enhanced patient safety.