As healthcare organizations continue to seek innovative ways to offer the best patient care, they need help from all corners, especially given a challenging financial backdrop and an unpredictable regulatory environment.
Technology offers significant promise in solving the real estate problems that hinder today’s healthcare leaders, including strategies for using capital more effectively.
Below are examples of how technology is helping healthcare organizations tackle today’s operational and financial challenges. All aim to reduce costs and improve efficiencies so organizations can focus on what matters most—patient care.
AI-Driven Solutions
Healthcare leaders are tasked with making decisions daily and rapidly as new circumstances and challenges arise. For assistance, organizations can benefit from AI-driven solutions such as tools that allow them to manage their assets and facilities more efficiently.
These tools can provide quantitative and qualitative data that help an organization maximize the useful life of an asset, according to Cheryl Carron, COO, Americas Work Dynamics, and president, Healthcare Division, JLL, Chicago. “If you have 24-hour operations like most hospitals, you need to keep things going,” she says. “Using technology for strategic maintenance planning to control when there’s downtime for an asset allows you to provide uninterrupted patient care.”
Being able to pivot from reactive to planned maintenance made a world of difference for one hospital system in Chicago. Using the cloud-based computerized maintenance management system tool Corrigo, the organization transformed its work order management, allowing maintenance staff to save valuable time and reducing costs substantially.
Previously, staff could not effectively track when a work order was complete and would need to physically go to a site to check. Now, they can use Corrigo to analyze work orders for the day or week and determine which orders are a priority and how many staff members they require to perform the work. The team can also capture trends in data by season, time of year and patient volume. At a moment when organizations are short-staffed in all areas, the time savings has been invaluable.
“Now more than ever, it’s critical we maximize maintenance staff’s time due to the shortage of technical trade workers in healthcare,” Carron says. “AI is helping organizations plan out their maintenance schedules, showing them where there could be additional tools, parts or people needed.”
AI and other emerging technologies are also helping healthcare organizations more effectively manage use of their physical spaces, which allows them to respond to changing patient demographics and needs, like a shift of care from inpatient to outpatient settings. Outpatient care needs are poised to grow as technology is expected to reduce inpatient volumes by 1.8 million over the next five years, according to JLL’s 2025 Health Care Trends to Watch.
Carron says AI is assisting organizations with capital planning thanks to its ability to analyze large swaths of geospatial and demographic data—rapidly—to identify where a patient population’s greatest needs are. Health systems are also using AI to automate lease administration, reducing human error and speeding up occupancy planning.
“It helps health systems know the utilization of space across campuses exactly without occupancy planners having to look through reams of information or go out to the site and count rooms and desks being used,” Carron says. “They can see how to better utilize the space or retrofit the space to meet a healthcare facility’s growing and changing demands.”
Energy Management Tools
The Chicago health system also implemented technology to manage its energy costs.
“We implemented 110 energy projects for the system and generated roughly $9 million of savings over five years, in addition to getting utility incentives to offset the startup costs of implementing some of the projects,” Carron says.
She notes hospital systems are also saving on costs and improving efficiencies with technology in other areas like building automation, system optimization, LED retrofitting, steam system upgrades, and chiller and cooling tower upgrades and improvements.
“All of it drives toward getting more useful life out of your assets and improving overall staff efficiency,” Carron says. “We know that employee dissatisfaction leads to reduced patient outcomes. When we have happy employees operating in spaces that are working and nothing is broken and they’re not disrupted, they then can provide the absolute best patient experience.”
Success Strategies
For organizations looking to take advantage of emerging healthcare real estate technologies, Carron has the following advice.
“You don’t need to do it all at once,” she says. “Start out with some individual problems you need to solve. Then try to see where technology can be leveraged efficiently and cost effectively to help you get the maximum value and return on that investment.”
Focus on change management. When employees don’t know the “why” behind a new technology or new processes, it can feel like just another thing to do or learn, which could make today’s overwhelmed workers feel even more so, Carron says. She suggests getting feedback early from staff and bringing champions on board to promote the use of the tools. Conducting small pilot projects that demonstrate to employees how a tool can save time, reduce waste and improve patient care—the ultimate goal—may also be useful.
Partner up. “So many organizations that we see are so great at what they do, but not every organization is great at technology,” Carron says. She advises seeking external partners that can provide insights into best practices and successes.
Make sure tech meets the mission. “The goal of technology utilization should be that healthcare organizations can focus on what their core mission is,” Carron says. “The tool should enable you to become more efficient and effective and allow you to have clearer line of sight to where you and your team need to be spending their energy, time and effort to drive to your core mission—excellent patient outcomes and happy employees.”
For more information, please contact Sara D’Onofrio, Healthcare Marketing Lead, JLL, at sara.donofrio@jll.com.