Health Facilities, You’ve Got the Data – Harness it to Up-Level Patient Experiences and Hospital Operations

By Brendon Buckley, senior director of healthcare technology at Johnson Controls
Brendon Buckley, senior director of healthcare technology at Johnson Controls It’s no secret that we’re asking a lot of healthcare facilities these days. The COVID-19 pandemic forced healthcare facilities to not only accommodate an elevated number of hospitalizations but also to adapt patient environments to limit the spread of disease, all while embracing holistic digitalization.

Imagine steering a battleship and being asked to turn it around but also to do it quickly… and transform it into a cruise ship simultaneously.

Luckily, there is one clear solution for healthcare facilities to accelerate digital transformation while boosting patient experience, facility resiliency, energy and operational efficiency, and business outcomes: unlock and integrate your data.

Lassoing Herds of Data to Power Digital Transformation
Any given hospital will have 200+ systems, between clinical, operational, facility and business platforms. From there, each facility will be working with 300+ interfaces. The result? Hospitals generate a mind-boggling amount of data – an estimated 50 petabytes per hospital each year, in fact. This enormous reservoir of data represents information on patients as well as clinical staff, room conditions and facility performance. Now, get this: only about 3-5% of that data is actually leveraged.

Let’s be honest – all of these systems are pretty expensive; why not extract more benefits?

Learning to not only gather but normalize and use that data is necessary for healthcare facilities to remain competitive and keep patients safe, healthy and comfortable. Hospitals can extract enormous value from that data by connecting siloed data and using the insights to make facilities smarter.

For healthcare operations leaders, that means it’s time to cozy up to your IT department and work with them closely to better analyze and use that data. When data-enabled building systems, IT, communications, clinical systems and more are integrated on a unified, secure and intelligent network, it enables more control and advanced automation, more efficient and sustainable operations, and improved comfort and safety for building occupants. You’ll never be able to use 100%, but even using 5% more of that data will enable major progress toward healthcare facility goals.

It’s Alive! Creating Smart, Sentient Patient Environments
Let’s get into specifics. By connecting patient data (like diagnosis and condition) with facility data (like room temperature and lighting) and staffing information, hospitals are able to create smart patient rooms that adapt to, communicate with and protect patients and clinical staff.

Imagine a hospital that:

• Improves patient sleep by adjusting lighting, noise management, meal delivery times and temperature according to their time of rest
• Improves security and provides patients more autonomy by having long-term patients provide a list of allowed visitors and visiting times; from there, access control technologies can control entry
• Limits the risk of patients falling by turning lights on and sending an automated message to wait for a nurse when significant motion is detected
• Takes a personalized approach through digital photos, which can be changed to show motivational messages, inspirational landscapes, or photos of loved ones
• Uses authenticated medical lockers with access control locks, to ensure safe and accurate narcotics delivery and administration
• Can quickly adapt spaces to accommodate an influx of highly infectious patients by digitally adjusting room elements like air pressure, temperature and access controls

The road to digital transformation for healthcare facilities is long, but it need not be treacherous. Keep in mind that digitalization is a journey, not a destination, and it’s OK to move forward by taking small steps in the right direction.

Johnson Controls works with 83% of hospitals in North America, so we know how to move healthcare facilities along the road to digitalization while maintaining energy and operational efficiency, supporting patient and staff experiences, and bolstering revenue. Visit our website to learn more.