Engineering and Facilities Track: 2024 ACE Summit

Improved healthcare facilities play a critical role in enhancing patient experience and efficiency. The healthcare facilities manager must be adept at working across departments to gain necessary input and buy-in, while managing collaborative relationships and building trust with a number of outside business partners. The Engineering/Facilities Track will provide a big-picture perspective into the ways senior executives are identifying and implementing the most effective strategies for addressing the challenges and opportunities of facility management. Topics covered will include emerging trends, best practices for reuse, redesign and decommissioning a facility, designing for disaster, methods of addressing the increase in outpatient care, facilities benchmarking, evaluating new technology and strategies to reduce costs without impacting patient safety and HCAHPS scores. These sessions are designed for healthcare executives with facilities management responsibility, and sales and marketing executives targeting this market segment.

More than 15 percent of U.S. hospitals are at risk of potential closure, according to Business Insider, who based the estimate on a recent report from Morgan Stanley. As the healthcare model has transformed from traditional hospitals to various alternate care facilities, there has also been an increase in the number of hospital renovations and/or repurposing projects. The challenges that come with such changes are complex. This is far more than simply liquidating equipment. In fact, dealing with equipment-related matters is rather minor in comparison to many issues which surface in the reuse and/or decommissioning effort.

Learning Objectives:

Describe the process to safely and securely repurpose a healthcare facility.
Identify the steps that need to be taken before, during, and after a renovation project.
Discuss the regulatory requirements that must be followed when decommissioning a healthcare facility.
Examine potential problems that can arise when renovating or decommissioning a facility.

Recent natural disasters, cybersecurity threats, and acts of violence have made resiliency a top priority for hospitals and health systems. The very nature of the healthcare facility makes it vital that it be able to provide services despite any eventuality and often just designing to code does not provide sufficient resiliency for long-term calamities. All groups involved in the design process must work together to achieve the objectives of creating a building that is disaster-ready, patient friendly, flexible, and cost-effective. This session will explore the elements necessary to best prepare a hospital or healthcare facility to provide continuous, effective, and efficient care in any situation.

Learning Objectives:

Review the potential crisis conditions that hospitals and designers must consider when planning for resiliency.
Discuss key requirements of recent legislation designed to improve the safety and privacy of patients.
Identify methods of collaboration that can improve and streamline the design process.
Formulate action plans based on lessons learned from recent hospital evacuations and disaster situations.

Technology has disrupted many industries. This session will highlight recent technology advances that are changing the face of healthcare construction and design. Jacob D’Albora will highlight a recent project by Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and the technology that was leveraged to successfully deliver a full design-assist process. Jay Ticer will share strategies and methods to proactively capture the best of new and emerging healthcare technology, while mitigating the risks of disrupting healthcare design and construction projects’ clinical, operational, and financial goals.

Learning Objectives:

Understand the potential of new technology to integrate the design team, construction team, and owners.
Identify savings that are possible with the use of new technology and an integrated workflow.
Analyze the technology that was used at MUSC to implement a full design-assist process.
Describe methods of addressing common communication and collaboration issues that are typical in construction projects.

Benchmarking has become a common component of most comprehensive facility quality improvement plans. When voluntary and active partnership between all stakeholders is included in the benchmarking process, it becomes a proactive and beneficial approach to capital planning. Breaking down the silos among different participants in the process is key. Such collaboration helps ensure transparency at every level, provides facts and statistics to support key decisions, and results in improved outcomes. This panel of three facilities managers will delve into the ways benchmarking is giving their organizations increased performance visibility, reducing operating expenses, and improving energy management and sustainability. Discussion will also include how to identify facility cost drivers and how to reduce OPEX without impacting patient safety, HCAHPS scores or facility life.

Learning Objectives:

Discuss the hallmarks of successful benchmarking in healthcare facilities management.
Identify best practices for assessing strengths and weaknesses via benchmarking against other facilities.
Specify the ways that benchmarking can help you make your case for capital investment and resource allocation.
Define methods of identifying facility cost drivers and reducing expenses while maintaining successful outcomes.

2019 Engineering and Facilities Track The 2020 Engineering and Facilities Track will be announced at a later date.

2019 Engineering and Facilities Track

The 2020 Engineering and Facilities Track will be announced at a later date.