Equipped to meet sustainability goals

Health care facilities face challenges when trying to simultaneously meet sustainability-related goals and cut costs. To tackle these issues, it’s important to select the right equipment for the building and location, and commission those systems and equipment to make sure they work correctly. Trouble hits, however, when key people are left out of the planning process.

Design engineers, facilities managers, maintenance staff, energy managers, sustainability leaders, commissioning agents and finance teams all bring important skills to the table. These professions work together to balance costs, efficiency and reliability while ensuring equipment helps with infection control. Adding construction and inventory managers to the team helps with planning and reducing risks.

Technology also plays a role in ensuring infrastructure helps meet sustainability goals. Smart building technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming more common. For example, AI-powered systems can continuously check equipment to keep everything running smoothly or let the owner know when there are issues that need to be addressed, but they require careful planning to ensure systems have the appropriate security measures. Other considerations for health care organizations include:

• Energy use. Standards for new equipment sometimes need fine-tuning to meet sustainability goals.
• Supply chain. Equipment lead times, and parts and skilled labor shortages can make upkeep harder.
• Risk planning. Linking risks to continuity plans ensures equipment meets operational needs.
• Growth. Specifications should account for evolving codes and future capacity demands.

It’s important to ask questions like: What can be value-engineered responsibly? How will future growth affect energy use? By thinking ahead and involving the right people, facilities can build systems that are reliable, efficient and sustainable.

Shay Rankhorn, CHFM, CHC, FASHE,  is a partner at Facility Diagnostics LLC.