by Brianna Crandall — August 10, 2016 — Hospital technology available to manage functions such as room cleaning, heating and cooling maintenance and patient transportation typically operates on different systems that do not interface with one another. To streamline hospital facility service management, Aramark, a global provider of food, facilities management and uniforms, has integrated multiple systems into a new Web-based platform called FacilityFit.
Victor Crawford, Aramark’s Healthcare chief operating officer (COO), commented:
Aramark’s new FacilityFit technology is an innovation designed to help hospitals and healthcare facilities drive efficiency and predictability and improve the patient experience through better management of functions that touch patients every day, like room cleaning, heating and cooling, and building maintenance.
FacilityFit works through mobile devices, traditional work stations or call center environments that link facility associates to the system. The platform can be customized for activities including:
- Asset and Work Order Management — Where it enables users to schedule maintenance for assets such as boilers, chillers, generators, lighting and other equipment critical to facility operation. This function tracks repair history as well as equipment use and age data to assist with replacement planning. It also enables quick response to address repair needs for structural issues like water leaks or unsafe flooring.
- Space Care Management — Where it incorporates variables such as cleanable square feet and inpatient and outpatient volume to create cleaning tasks, and uses the data to develop accurate and equitable staffing models. It also deploys associates for specialized cleaning and maintenance and tracks task completion status and history.
- Bed Management — Where it tracks patient discharge, provides automated requests to deploy associates for room cleaning, and provides notification when a room is ready for re-occupancy.
- Central Transportation — Where it helps schedule patient transport and dispatch transport associates, and tracks timelines. This function also coordinates the transport of lab specimens and medical supplies to patient units.
- Inspections/Quality Control — Where its capabilities include all facility-related quality inspection categories. It randomly selects areas in the building for spot inspection, deploys inspection associates, and tracks data for regulatory requirements.
- Personnel Management — Where it tracks associate training requirements and completion status, inventories career management activities, tracks individual associate recognition history and enables users to create work schedules.
Across all of these functions, FacilityFit generates reports that offer hospitals and healthcare facilities a real-time operating dashboard to evaluate metrics such as: work completion rates, throughput efficiency, cleaning efficiency, response times, labor utilization, safety performance, work history and financial efficiency.
FacilityFit operates in a highly secure environment and is supported by dedicated Aramark technical experts. The system upgrades automatically, and users have access to a 24X7 National Service Center for ongoing support. When installing FacilityFit, Aramark provides onsite technical expertise to perform space and asset inventories to promote the accuracy of baseline data. Onsite staff also helps to assist with customized system set-up and associate training at installation.
Two versions of the technology are available: FacilityFit and FacilityFit Pro. Hospitals and health systems that are not Aramark-managed service clients can purchase the standard suite of FacilityFit products and features as a standalone product for use by its self-managed staff.
A version called FacilityFit Pro is an extended suite of products and features that is available as a component of Aramark managed-service contracts. All of Aramark’s existing hospital facility service clients will transition to FacilityFit Pro, and all new managed service clients will get it as part of Aramark’s standard operating suite.
Crawford continued:
FacilityFit is essentially a “nerve center” that provides the technical infrastructure and data to increase the transparency, productivity and control of hospital facility service. The system is a powerful tool that can drive patient satisfaction outcomes, pinpoint capital planning needs and help standardize facility service delivery by comparing performance at different locations.
To learn more about FacilityFit, visit the Aramark Web site.
