Eliminating Medical Deserts with Holistic Asset Management

By Jennifer Perkins

In 2024, Florida braced for back-to-back hurricanes when Helene and Milton barreled through the state only two weeks apart. Hurricanes and other severe weather events can wreak havoc on communities, damaging infrastructure and impacting hospital and healthcare facility conditions and operations—underscoring the importance of infrastructure investments. As a recent example, the Tampa Bay General Hospital utilized AquaFences to combat the effects of Hurricane Milton, allowing the hospital to remain open not only for the patients actively receiving care prior to the storm, but also for residents who needed health services in the hurricane’s aftermath. 

Infrastructure’s Impact on Healthcare Operations  

Infrastructure’s importance is at the forefront of communities in the middle of a crisis or major disaster, but it’s often an afterthought otherwise. This extends from the most critically important core healthcare operations to the surrounding civic infrastructure necessary to keep healthcare operations running. When a broader ecosystem of organizations leverages asset management solutions to monitor and maintain infrastructure, the entire community benefits from improved healthcare operations.  

From the roads and bridges citizens drive on to the running water the community depends on, it’s imperative that infrastructure serve a community as intended—especially when citizens need healthcare. In urban areas, residents can access in-person healthcare in different ways, via public transportation, driving themselves, or walking. However, if the subway route to the hospital is closed for unexpected emergency repairs, it can impact access to health services—or in the case of an emergency, impede their ability to obtain medical attention in a timely manner. Similarly, people in medical deserts—places with limited or no healthcare access—or rural areas, who rely on one main roadway to access the hospital, could be unable to seek medical attention if the road is closed for unplanned maintenance. When the community prioritizes its infrastructure by integrating preventive maintenance, it ensures that all residents have open access to their healthcare centers.  

Infrastructure Management in Action  

Asset management solutions provide hospitals and healthcare facilities with tools to monitor infrastructure needs and collect data to ensure assets receive regular maintenance and are replaced at the end of their lifecycle. This data-driven decisionmaking can extend beyond collecting and acting on data— it can justify budget and funding needs for the short- and long-term. This can also lead to a culture of collaborative engagement with community stakeholders, like healthcare facilities leaders and city council members. 

Hospital systems can benefit from utilizing asset management solutions to monitor and maintain their infrastructure to ensure patients receive the best care in the best place. One facilities maintenance team at Children’s Health, a children’s hospital in Dallas, transformed how it made decisions when it switched to an asset management tool in 2020. By leveraging data gathered on the hospital’s assets and infrastructure, the facilities management team ultimately secured funding and saved millions on potential repair costs.  

Children’s Health realized the positive impact of technology in three key areas of facilities maintenance: driving improved decisionmaking, facilitating capital planning and justifying capital funding requests. With indisputable data on hand, the hospital’s facilities operators have been able to make more strategic decisions to improve scenario planning and provide justification to start or stop facility projects.  

The population Children’s Health serves continue to grow, and with it, the need to expand its facilities. While capital planning can seem like a daunting task, the facilities operations team leveraged its infrastructure and asset data to develop a 10-year financial forecast of all its buildings, strategically planning for new building uses or equipment upgrades. 

In fact, Children’s Health leveraged its asset data to justify its capital funding need, securing $20 million for a new piece of equipment. The data showed that the team paid for maintenance on the same piece of equipment five times in one year, highlighting the time and money the facility was wasting in repair, labor and downtime. The hospital identified and prioritized critical infrastructure investments, optimizing strategic decision making by informing funding decisions and long-term planning needs. 

Community Impact of Infrastructure Maintenance 

Similarly, upon realizing the negative impacts poorly maintained infrastructure can have on the community, the town of Howe, Texas changed how it tracked and maintained the community’s assets and infrastructure, switching from pen and paper processes to an asset management solution. Transitioning to a software system allowed Howe’s operations team to identify city-owned assets that hadn’t been tracked or repaired and to schedule ongoing preventive maintenance for all its infrastructure—including the infrastructure that leads community members to hospitals and health clinics. 

Reliable healthcare infrastructure is undeniably important to ensure community health and safety, and so is the underlying infrastructure within cities at large. When hospitals and communities ensure infrastructure is properly funded and maintained, they keep facilities functioning and allow citizens to access the care they need, when they need it.  

Jennifer Perkins is a senior government industry specialist at Brightly Software, a Siemens company.