Why hospitals need to centralise their monitoring to ensure all critical equipment and systems are working

Hospitals are highly complex environments where it is critical for precise temperatures, humidity, pressurisation, air quality and lighting to be maintained 24/7. This ensures the comfort and safety of patients, employees, suppliers and visitors and enables pharmaceutical storage facilities to function correctly.

Ensuring constant environmental conditions is crucial for the stability of pharmaceutical products. Poor temperature control can be detrimental to the effectiveness of drugs and can cost thousands if they become unusable.

Some medications must be frozen at -15°C or lower, some should be refrigerated at between 2–8°C, and some do not need cold storage but must be stored in a cool, dry place away from bright lighting or direct sunlight.

Hospital building management and control systems

Maintaining these precise environmental controls is essential in hospitals. Building Management and Control Systems (BMCS) are designed to handle this monumental task and are sometimes pushed to the limit. Hospital facilities managers must continually analyse environmental control data, predict challenges, respond to changing conditions and deliver reports in line with regulatory compliance requirements.

With patient satisfaction and health outcomes more closely aligned to revenues than ever, hospitals are looking for ways to enhance the patient experience. The performance of their buildings and medical storage facilities is critical to achieving this. Modern BMCS provide a bird’s-eye view into system performance affecting everything from climate control to lighting, which enables them to guarantee a safer and more comfortable experience for patients and the right storage environment for medications.

This level of integration and centralised control becomes increasingly important due to other changes happening in the healthcare sector. The majority of healthcare facilities have become large networks spread across different locations. With this transition, the challenge of managing many buildings across multiple sites is common; however, these complex networks need to be monitored centrally to ensure that they are functioning as they should.

In addition, BMCS are becoming the core infrastructure for smart hospitals that are doing away with siloed systems and incorporating intelligent BMCS that can support energy efficiency and are fully interoperable with other healthcare software and systems.

Agile healthcare facilities

Healthcare environments are continually evolving to meet the increasing expectations of patients. New technologies allow administrators to improve patient satisfaction and outcomes through connectivity and access to information while achieving regulatory compliance.

An agile healthcare facility allows hospital management to plan and build interoperable technologies that meet current demands and scale as needed to meet future requirements.

Centralised monitoring at Leiden University Medical Centre

In 2019, Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands decided to switch to a new network monitoring system. The hospital already had multiple monitoring solutions in place for different departments, but they wanted a system where various elements could be monitored from within a single environment. The aim was to be able to monitor the health of the network 24 hours a day.

LUMC’s PRTG implementation has consolidated and simplified its monitoring. It now has a single dashboard to show the status of all systems at a glance to those who are responsible for them. This has provided them with instant insight into what was going on. They even display the dashboards around the hospital on large TV screens, which means that all staff get the same important information they need.

Predictive maintenance

Equipment performance data analysis is essential in healthcare settings and can help hospitals to transition from following a preventive maintenance strategy to a predictive one.

This enables them to plan for maintenance to occur when notified about equipment performance issues by their monitoring system rather than by relying on fixed timetables or reactively addressing equipment failures.

By collecting the data and completing the analysis, facilities managers can schedule resources more efficiently and have the flexibility to minimise impacts on patients and medical staff.

Hospitals need a single pane of glass

All hospitals should be able to deter, detect, delay, defend and deny at every layer of their healthcare facility’s systems, network and equipment, reducing the risk of anything going wrong and also increasing the IT team’s peace of mind.

However, all too often, hospitals operate several separate monitoring solutions to ensure their facilities are running as they should. With better systems integration, a ‘single pane of glass’ will pull the data from all hospital BMCS into one dashboard. The ultimate goal is to consolidate any siloed systems into a single front end, which means that a hospital can maintain the precise environmental conditions required using centralised infrastructure monitoring.

This centralised monitoring approach will help them run a more efficient and productive healthcare facility. More importantly, it can help provide the seamless, personalised healthcare experience that today’s patients, visitors and clinicians expect in a connected world.

Image credit: iStock.com/Natali_Mis