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In a featured discussion at HealthSpaces ’24, three health system facilities leaders put their heads together to examine the state of the industry today. What does it take to get the ball rolling on massive infrastructure projects? How can large hospital systems reduce their carbon emissions? What do successful talent retention strategies look like in 2024? They tackled these questions and others, diving deep into their ambitious responses to the challenges ahead.
Moderated by Renee Jacobs, Healthcare Director at Distech Controls, the discussion included Andy Woommavovah, VP of Facility Management, Construction and Sustainability at Trinity Health; Vincent Grippo, VP of Enterprise Services at Northwell Health; and Jesse Balok, VP of Campus Planning and Operational Integration at Henry Ford Health.
Taking Inventory of Facilities Needs
The panelists started with a discussion of the challenges they face—some familiar, some new—in today’s healthcare facilities landscape. Chief among these is the eternal struggle for capital. “Facilities don’t generate revenue, so we have to compete with the da Vincis, the MRIs, the CTs,” Woommavovah said. “We don’t win that battle; it’s become a challenge for us to compete.”
Trinity Health dedicates about $50 million each year in funding for infrastructure, but using that $50 million is akin to “shooting a BB gun at a freight train,” Woommavovah added: good for dealing with critical failures, bad for long-term planning. He suspects the solution lies in a system for taking inventory of assets and identifying the greatest needs. Recalling a series of facilities condition assessments he conducted in a previous role at CommonSpirit Health, he stressed that senior leadership tends to be responsive to solid data. “It helps carry your message if you can connect it to revenue impact: “if this air handler goes down, these are the dollars it’s gonna cost the hospital.”
L to R: Andy Woommavovah, Vincent Grippo, Jesse Balok.
Balok shared a similar perspective from Henry Ford, where his team is constantly figuring out how to adapt old facilities to the modern world. “How do we continue to function in an aging infrastructure, while also looking at how we create this environment of seamlessness?” he asked. “How do we look at new energy sources? How do we reduce our carbon footprint?”
The answer, unsurprisingly, boils down to spending money: in Henry Ford’s case, on the $235 million Central Energy Hub, which will use a hot and chilled water pump system to provide electric heating and cooling. “We're in a rebuilding mode right now,” Balok said. “We understand that we can't continue what we've been doing for the last several decades.”
Grippo spoke about the intense pressures he’s facing at Northwell, which operates 23 hospitals and 1,000 sites. In recent years, his team has begun devoting increased resources to infrastructure projects that historically got overlooked in favor of growth capital projects. In some cases, they’ve also prioritized initiatives that individual facilities may not even be asking for themselves. “The operators might prioritize additional parking over critical systems,” he said. “We have to balance that and ensure we’re prioritizing the right things.”
A Holistic Approach to Workforce Development
Turning to ongoing workforce challenges, the panelists unpacked various strategies they’re taking to recruit and retain talent. Woommavovah spoke to the importance of employee engagement surveys, though he stressed that it’s not just a matter of listening to employees’ feedback—you also have to respond to it. “If you want folks to stay engaged, you want to give them what they ask for when you train them to move up within your company,” he said. “You’re growing your own crop.”
His team at CommonSpirit created a learning management program to develop employee training programs, an effort he hopes to emulate at Trinity Health. Among other things, he hopes the initiative helps preserve institutional knowledge in an aging workforce. “When these folks are starting to retire and you're having these vacancies, you're able to bring folks up right now,” he said. “When some of these senior folks leave, tons of institutional knowledge goes away with them just because we didn't have a great opportunity to start that backfill. But we have that vision now and the strategy to move it forward.”
Balok views workforce challenges through the lens of culture. “The thematic that drives a lot of our recruitment now is change—the opportunity to transform,” he said. Success is constantly asking what can be done differently, from clinical processes to talent development; it requires an openness to innovative solutions and an ever-present sense of curiosity. “It comes with seeing new ideas, maybe asking people for input where we haven't been able to respond to that input and actually put it into play,” he added. “That transformation comes out in many different ways, and I think it's gonna continue to raise the boat for us.”
Meeting Sustainability Challenges Head-On
The final portion of the conversation focused on sustainability and the various approaches each panelist’s institution is taking to its clean energy goals. While Trinity Health doesn’t yet have a sustainability program, Woommavovah said, it’s currently mapping its carbon footprint, which will allow it to start developing meaningful goals. In the meantime, his team is setting energy design standards for new construction projects, while incorporating solar power, natural gas, and other green solutions wherever possible.
Henry Ford, meanwhile, is well on its way toward its goal of complete carbon neutrality by 2040. Naturally, the Clean Energy Hub—which aims to create a fully electric-powered hospital—is a key part of this. Balok’s team is also looking at ways to reduce landfill, use more sustainable construction materials, and exploring other renewable energy sources. “We need to get a culture that believes that's important and where it's ingrained in the everyday,” he said. “We're coming at it from two different directions, top-down and bottom-up.”
Grippo described a similar approach at Northwell, which has committed to 50% emission reductions by 2030 and net zero by 2050. Thanks to solar farms, retro-commissioning existing facilities, buying hydropower, using natural gas instead of oil-burning gas, and other solutions, they’re already halfway to the 2030 target. “We’ve made 23% of the 50% reduction goal,” he said. “We’ve made significant progress, but we still have a lot of work to do.”
His team has learned a few lessons from their efforts. Perhaps most importantly, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to sustainability: green roofs may be appropriate for one facility but not another, and solar power may make sense in one region but be impractical elsewhere. “You have to look at each facility individually,” Grippo concluded, “and you have to develop a plan for each facility that works.”
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