By HFT Editorial Staff

Banner Health, a non-profit health system based in Phoenix that serves patients in six states, won the 2021 Excellence in Health Care Facility Management Award for centralizing facilities operations with a remote operations center (ROC). The award was presented by the American Society for Health Care Engineering (ASHE) of the American Hospital Association.

The Banner Health team consolidated once decentralized technology, policies, processes and procedures, creating universal protocols to ensure the best approach is applied to the operation of all building equipment. The ROC also allows the team to identify anomalies in equipment operations across their facility portfolio, and its initiation shifted Banner’s healthcare facilities management practices to data-driven decision processes.

The ROC also underpins the conservation of resources that support sustainability goals and patient care. Since 2016, the team has reduced annual energy spend by almost $12 million per year. Its operations directly impact the patient healing environment and include proactively monitoring patient room temperature setpoints to ensure patient comfort, generating dashboards that present real-time pressure, humidity and temperature data to prevent health care-acquired infections, and predicting failure in facility equipment before it occurs.

The Excellence in Health Care Facility Management Award recognizes individuals or facility management departments that implement new or innovative programs or processes to optimize the physical environment and improve patient care. For more information about ASHE awards, visit ashe.org/awards.