While most modern buildings feature some kind of connective technology, developers, owners, and tenants are increasingly gravitating toward buildings that seamlessly integrate many kinds of technology with a central building operating system from which every function can be monitored and controlled, such as a building management system. A recent survey by building management solutions company Toggled revealed that 78% of businesses have embraced these so-called holistic “smart building” solutions.
Most facilities that have adopted this technology so far have been in the multifamily and office sectors, but healthcare stakeholders are beginning to take notice. According to an analysis by Coherent Market Insights, the global hospital market size is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 21% from 2023 to 2030, and the impacts of smart building technology—including reduced costs, enhanced operational efficiency, enhanced patient outcomes, and improved equipment performance—are amplified in the high-stakes world of healthcare.
What kind of influence could the utilization of smart technology have on the healthcare sector? Smart building technologies can transform how hospitals and other medical buildings operate, improving services for both patients and staff. Additionally, in a landscape where patients have choices on where to seek treatment, staff experience and happiness are crucial for driving patient satisfaction.
A Healthcare System in Critical Condition
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed serious issues with the provision of healthcare in the United States. A shortage of providers, inefficient facility operations, lack of automation, and inadequate information sharing combined to push the system—and its workers—to the brink. While the pandemic has passed, some of those vulnerabilities persist. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a shortage of 195,000 nurses by the year 2031, while the Association of American Medical Colleges estimates a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians.
Healthcare organizations cannot continue with business as usual, and smart building technologies offer them an opportunity to address multiple issues, including one of the main drivers of staffing shortages: medical staff leaving the field due to burnout. The process automation that comes with these solutions can help alleviate the overwhelming workloads and long hours that lead to burnout. Smart building technology can also make life easier for providers and workers by streamlining reporting and compliance, minimizing disruptions due to equipment failures, and enhancing indoor environmental quality.
In the near future, knowledge management systems powered by artificial intelligence could potentially assist medical staff with diagnoses and help health systems identify potential outbreaks due to foodborne illness or burgeoning epidemics.
Indoor Air Quality
In an office, suboptimal humidity, temperature, or particulate levels can hinder productivity. In a hospital, they can impede a patient’s recovery, compromise the sterility of spaces and instruments, and even result in legal and compliance problems. That’s why a primary focus of healthcare organizations considering smart building solutions is on managing the quality of the indoor environment.
Environmental sensors can be paired with HVAC systems in a smart building platform to make real-time adjustments to temperature, airflow, and humidity based on occupancy or other conditions. They can also monitor for particulate matter and volatile organic compounds that could spread viruses and infections or trigger allergies, and automatically push fresh air into spaces to dilute pollutants back to safe levels.
Another example of how smart building technology can be used to support patient comfort and recovery is automated lighting and window shading systems. These systems can be set to raise or lower window shades and adjust lighting automatically based on the time and weather conditions throughout the day to maintain room temperature and maximize the availability of natural light, which helps to reduce energy usage and keep costs down.
Electronic Check-In
Office building operators and owners are embracing smart visitor management systems to smooth the process of welcoming guests. These same systems can be deployed in healthcare facilities to assist with patient check-in and triage, enforce visiting hours, and even reduce the risk of spreading infections. Electronic check-in eliminates the need for pens, paper, and clipboards, all of which can carry germs and viruses. In addition, patients who complete forms electronically prior to their visit spend less time in waiting rooms, where pathogens are more likely to be transmitted.
Automating the healthcare facility check-in process frees up administrative and clinical staff to focus on more important matters, and the information gleaned during this process can be fed into knowledge management systems for easy access by clinicians.
Access Control
An important underlying requirement of visitor management and electronic check-in is access control systems. Many office building operators and owners have adopted smart access control and security systems to help modernize, standardize, and enhance occupant experience and improve data insights. In hospitals and clinics, certain rooms or wings—like nurseries or pharmaceutical dispensaries—require different levels of access permission. When put to work in a healthcare setting, smart building security systems can prevent individuals from gaining access to areas they’re not supposed to be in and can even sense and respond to unusual occupancy patterns in general access areas like corridors and waiting rooms.
For example, if sensors indicate a large or unruly gathering of people in a space, the security system can activate additional cameras, restrict access to that area, and even alert law enforcement. Additionally, if access to an area needs to be restricted for one or multiple people, access management can be audited in real time and credential offboarding can be done in one click by any staff member with permission, not just building security.
Equipment Performance and Predictive Maintenance
When an HVAC system or elevator breaks in an office building, the result can be discomfort, financial risk, and general inconvenience. In a hospital, these outages can be a matter of life and death. That’s why healthcare providers are embracing technologies that enable proactive, real-time, and predictive maintenance.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices, software, and systems, like vibration sensors and smart meters, can be placed on, around, or within equipment to collect and transmit information about their performance. This data can be used to detect any changes in the status of equipment that might indicate an impending failure or the need for urgent maintenance and pinpoint sources of energy and water waste.
Digital twins are another smart building solution that healthcare facilities are embracing to prevent mechanical breakdowns. A digital twin is a virtual copy of a real-world system that simulates the operation of pieces of equipment over time. By leveraging digital twins, healthcare facility managers can anticipate problem areas in advance and strategically plan predictive maintenance to avoid equipment failure and optimize performance.
Standardization of Building Systems Through Software
As healthcare systems continue to evolve, standardization, or establishing consistent protocols, procedures, and technical specifications for building systems in healthcare facilities, plays a crucial role in optimizing operations and improving patient care. In particular, the application of standardization principles to building systems through software offers six key benefits:
- Efficiency and Consistency: Standardizing software solutions ensures uniformity across various healthcare facilities. Whether monitoring equipment or controlling environmental conditions, keeping software practices consistent streamlines processes and reduce inefficiencies.
- Exchanging Information: By adhering to common standards, healthcare building systems can seamlessly exchange data. Interoperability is the ability for computer systems to exchange information between various systems, such as building automation systems, indoor air quality sensors, and other environmental sensors. For example, a healthcare system can collect air quality sensors across all their spaces regardless of the underlying hardware to monitor in a single dashboard regardless of the facility they are in.
- Quality Assurance: Standardized software undergoes rigorous testing and validation. This ensures that it meets predefined criteria for safety, accuracy, and reliability. Whether air quality standards, humidity standards, or safety protocols, adherence to standards enhances overall quality and improves management outcomes.
- Risk Mitigation: Healthcare systems deal with sensitive patient data and critical processes. Standardized software helps mitigate risks by providing clear guidelines for security, privacy, and data protection. It ensures that software developers follow best practices and comply with regulatory requirements.
- Scalability: As healthcare systems expand—whether through mergers, acquisitions, or organic growth—standardized software can scale seamlessly. It allows new facilities to adopt established practices, reducing implementation challenges and minimizing disruptions.
- Cost Savings: Standardization reduces customization efforts and simplifies maintenance. When smart software components follow common protocols, updates and enhancements become more straightforward. This leads to cost savings over the long term.
Challenges to Deploying Smart Building Technology in Healthcare Facilities
While adopting smart technology can yield significant benefits for healthcare organizations, the complexity of deploying these solutions can be daunting. The integration of smart building technologies tends to be far more complicated in healthcare settings compared to office or multifamily installations.
This complexity arises because healthcare facilities accommodate a diverse range of users—doctors, medical staff, janitorial workers, administrators, patients, and visitors—each requiring different permissions and access levels. Consequently, smart building systems in healthcare settings must incorporate a robust roles and permissions framework to manage both digital and physical access to features. Additionally, in the case of hospitals operating as campuses, these systems may need to be spread over multiple buildings, adding another layer of complexity.
Another hurdle for smart technology adoption in a healthcare setting is that these systems require clean and comprehensive data to operate effectively. Building management systems, for example, are only as good as the sensor and meter network feeding them information. Facilities in which the installation of this hardware is incomplete or executed haphazardly will fail to realize the full benefits of smart building solutions.
The key to overcoming these obstacles is to implement an integrated project delivery method, which requires the parties involved in an installation to work as a team. This approach mirrors what facilities are attempting to accomplish in deploying smart building technologies: integrating information from disparate sources into an ecosystem that can drive cost savings, increased efficiency, and improved patient outcomes.
Any investment by healthcare organizations in smart building technology must come with a return on investment (ROI). In the healthcare industry, the sources of that ROI are manifold: cost savings, energy savings, reduced overhead, improved operational efficiency and equipment performance, enhanced auditability, along with increased employee and patient satisfaction.
The office and multifamily sectors have already been a proving ground for many of these technologies. However, the need for these types of solutions is even more acute in healthcare, which continues to grapple with issues like staffing shortages, waste, and cost concerns. It’s time for hospitals and other medical facilities to embrace smart building technology—but they need to do so the right way. Working with project management partners who are familiar with the capabilities and complexities of these systems can help healthcare industry leaders optimize smart building installations and realize ROI more swiftly and substantially.
