Commissioning for Care: How Facility Improvements Enhance Patient Experience and Streamline Clinical Workflows.

Patient comfort is more than convenience – it is a systems-level factor that connects to and interacts with the hospital environment, staff efficiency, and overall quality of care. In the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) framework, the Internal (Physical) Environment is one of six components of the overall work system, influencing processes and helping to shape process and patient outcomes. And yet, the design of HVAC systems and making improvements to those systems are often performed with little to no consideration of how to take advantage of these interactions to improve patient outcomes and streamline clinical workflows. This session demonstrates how monitoring-based commissioning improves comfort while reducing staff workload and energy costs. Attendees will see how aligning environmental performance with process improvement strengthens patient satisfaction and hospital operations and learn why addressing comfort is not just good practice, but essential for driving reliable, high-quality care.  

After attending this presentation, the attendees will be able to apply a systems-level framework linking patient satisfaction, clinical workflow efficiency, hospital energy performance, and cost savings from commissioning to demonstrate how these improvements benefit the hospital as a whole.

After attending this presentation, the attendees will be able to explain how patient-experience survey data can reveal facility-related comfort issues that impact both hospital reimbursement and staff efficiency.

After attending this presentation, the attendees will be able to describe how facility-level data analytics and monitoring-based commissioning strategies can be applied to work-order data to reduce comfort complaints and optimize facilities management.