Texas Children's Hospital wins Excellence in Facility Management Award

Texas Children's Hospital's Mission Control initiative links data from various departments to track patient throughput.

Photo courtesy of Texas Children's Hospital

The facility management team at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston has received national recognition for developing an innovative solution to manage its patient throughput.

The American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE) of the American Hospital Association awarded the hospital the 2017 Excellence in Health Care Facility Management Award for its Mission Control project, which uses real-time data to track patient movement throughout the facility.

Mission Control is a unified operations center that links data from the 745-bed facility’s critical care admissions, room management, critical clinical alert systems, air and ground transportation, code dispatching, facilities and security departments. The information is fed into a consolidated dashboard displaying patient admissions and dispatches, ambulance locations and other key information to move patients in an efficient manner.

After the Mission Control project was completed, the hospital’s transfer team reduced the time from dispatch to pickup. The decrease in response time led to an increase in transports to the hospital.

“This unified operation has helped our institution reduce transportation times, improve the patient acceptance process and optimize system communication,” said Mark Mullarkey, Texas Children’s Hospital executive vice president. “Our facilities management group has played a key role in developing the vision and assisting in bringing Mission Control to life.”

ASHE’s Excellence in Health Care Facility Management Award is sponsored by Trane. It honors individuals and teams who exemplify how facility managers and caregivers join together to identify an issue and create a proactive and viable approach to attaining resolution that optimizes the physical environment and improves patient care.