ASHE launches guide to performing health facilities commissioning

by Brianna Crandall — April 23, 2012—A new handbook published in April by the American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE) of the American Hospital Association (AHA) is touted as a first-of-its-kind guide to the details of health facilities commissioning, a process developed to ensure that hospitals and other health care buildings operate as designed and planned.

ASHE’s Health Facility Commissioning Handbook is a hands-on guide that provides details to help facilities leaders implement the ASHE commissioning process both for construction projects and for existing facilities. ASHE introduced what it says is the only commissioning process specifically for health care facilities in its 2010 publication, Health Facility Commissioning Guidelines. The guidelines tailored the commissioning process specifically to health care to ensure hospitals—complex facilities operating 24/7 and serving patients with a wide variety of needs—will function as they should, both in the short term and the long term. Additionally, commissioning can help hospitals save resources, which is especially critical given the rising cost of health care, notes ASHE.

The new handbook is written to transform theory into practice. Health care organizations that take on the ASHE commissioning process will be able to:

• Ensure that project expectations are met in terms of efficient building system operations;
  
• Maintain the efficiency of building system operations over time to generate cost savings that can be used to help fund future projects;
  
• Build an operations and maintenance team that supports efficient, cost-effective operation of building systems; and
  
• Demonstrate that the cost of not commissioning is greater than the cost of commissioning a project or retrocommissioning an existing facility.