Taking the journey

The American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE) will celebrate half a century of excellence in health care facility management when it meets later this month for its 50th Annual Conference & Technical Exhibition in Atlanta.

As ASHE members mark the occasion by reviewing the organization's impressive growth in size and influence since its founding, they will consider the many changes health facility professionals have seen in technology, infrastructure, construction and management processes over the years.

For instance, the conference's opening session on "Evolution of the Facility Manager: Boiler Room to Board Room" will remind attendees how far they have come as a society and as professionals in their journey to optimize the health care physical environment. The session also will challenge them to be leaders in the future.

Indeed, while the conference will celebrate the health facility professionals' past, it will continue to examine the disruptive changes ahead. Toward that end, it also will feature programs on performance excellence, emerging technologies, regulatory issues and a wide variety of engineering topics.

Finally, in returning to the "boiler room to board room" theme set out at the beginning, the conference program also will include a number of sessions dedicated to making the case to senior executives for facility investments and about the value of the facility manager's mission.

When one thinks about it, learning from the past, gathering new data and using the results to inform new initiatives that will be presented to executives is a key part of the health facility professional's job. And no organization is better equipped to take its members on that journey than ASHE.