A discussion of digital transition impact on facility management of hospital buildings

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to contribute to the discussion of the following questions: How can the digital transition improve the management of the operation and maintenance of infrastructure in health-care facilities? What is the legacy for facility management (FM) teams in this post-COVID-19 management of hospital buildings? Design/methodology/approach Based on a literature review, this paper analyses and categorises existing research on the digital challenges for FM from 2011 until 2021 by conducting a qualitative and quantitative method of bibliometric analysis and discussing the status of digital transition impact on FM of the hospital buildings. Findings The trends and challenges of building information modelling, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things identified and discussed in this paper aim to be as comprehensive as possible to grasp the situation of digital transition in the FM industry in the hospital buildings context. Regarding digital maturity, the limited number of publications highlights that control and management systems cannot fully manage the entire operational phase of hospital buildings. Giving intelligence to buildings will undoubtedly be the future. So making buildings reactive, interactive and immersive is an inevitable transformation for intelligent hospital building systems. Thus, the added value of digitalisation will help facility managers to overcome the issues pointed out in this paper to deal with the growing health demands and enable them to mitigate the impacts of a new and future pandemic. Originality/value The novelty of this paper is classifying and unifying facility managers' tendencies regarding high-level information management issues, which are lacking in the literature, with a focus on the approaches with potential and higher impact on FM in the hospital building context and the related steps that should be considered regarding data collection and data structures. These tendencies provide a set of new intelligent approaches and tools, which will increase the efficiency of processes, significantly impacting the potential of optimisation. Also, these trends can improve planning and management of scope, costs, environment and safety in the value chain of projects and assets, thus creating a more resilient and sustainable industry for facility managers in this post-COVID-19 management for hospital buildings.