The Many Benefits of Connecting Your Hospital’s HTM, Facilities Maintenance, Space & Move, Real Estate, and Project Work
In today’s hospitals and health systems, every department must rely on and work with other departments. But for healthcare technology management (HTM), facilities maintenance, real estate, space planners, and construction project managers, the need for ongoing collaboration is critical.
The Nuvolo Connected Workplace for Healthcare solution is unique in the market because it’s a combination of software products – built on the ServiceNow platform – that are developed specifically to meet the needs of health care and enable hospital support departments to collaborate versus work in separate tools and silos. The solution has helped many of the top health systems and hospitals in the U.S. connect their people, locations, work, and applications – enabling them to seamlessly share pertinent information that helps them work smarter, not harder.
Here is an example of how one hospital tore down its silos, eliminated disparate applications that couldn’t share information between teams, and worked seamlessly on a major project using Nuvolo Connected Workplace for Healthcare products.
Hospital Expands Its Emergency Department
A 300-bed hospital decided it needed to expand and modernize its emergency department (ED). To do this, it needed to push the ED into the office area and conference room currently being used by hospital leadership. Utilizing the Nuvolo Space product, space planners tried to identify if there was any unused space in the hospital where the leadership team could be moved. Finding some space – but not enough – at a nearby leased office building, the real estate team utilized the Nuvolo Real Estate product to negotiate new favorable terms to add additional space to their lease agreement. Meanwhile, the hospital construction team used the Nuvolo Projects product to issue requests for proposals to construction companies and subcontractors to do the necessary renovation work on the ED, as well as the newly leased office space.
Once the contractors were chosen and construction began, other hospital support teams, like HTM, the facilities team, IT, and supply chain were needed to support the project. Utilizing Nuvolo Projects to keep the project on track and on budget, all teams were able to see what needed to occur and when, and they could track their expenses.
Using the Nuvolo HTM Asset Management CMMS, the HTM department inventoried the new clinical equipment purchased for the ED, easily set them up on planned maintenance schedules that aligned with the other equipment in the ED, and created initial inspection work orders to satisfy regulatory requirements. When assistance was needed from the facilities department, IT, or environmental services, HTM simply created another work order (assigned to the parent work order) and transferred it to the appropriate department to complete, thus ensuring a complete history on the work completed and seamless collaboration.
The facilities team worked with their Nuvolo Facilities Maintenance CMMS to inventory the assets needed for the new spaces and assign work orders for the work that they needed to complete. Throughout the project, they needed support from IT. Because IT used ServiceNow to track incidents, the facilities department could easily transfer work orders to IT with their work order notes, ensuring complete documentation of all the work performed by multiple teams.
The HTM department also wanted to make sure all networked medical devices they managed – known as operational technology (OT) – were protected from cyberattacks. The hospital integrated its third-party passive network monitoring application with the Nuvolo OT Security application to identify cyber risks and establish response protocols on every device. When a threat is identified, work orders identifying the impacted device(s) – along with contextual information such as the device type, location, who supports it, and the response required – is auto generated through their Nuvolo HTM Asset Management CMMS. The OT Security work order is dispatched automatically to the appropriate HTM and IT teams for an immediate and coordinated response.
After all work was completed, and the expanded ED was opened, the Nuvolo Space product was utilized again to document the expanded space usage in the ED and justify the increase in Medicare reimbursement submittals. The newly built executive conference room was added to the Nuvolo Reservations application so that staff could reserve the space for future meetings.
Whether you belong to a small stand-alone hospital, a large multi-state or international health system, or something in between, the Nuvolo Connected Workplace for Healthcare solution is scalable to meet the needs of your organization.
Interested in learning more? Explore the Nuvolo Connected Workplace for Healthcare solution at Nuvolo.com.
