New Handbook Shows How to Perform Health Facility Commissioning

CHICAGO – A new handbook published by the American Society for Healthcare Engineering is a first-of-its-kind guide to the details of health facility commissioning, a process developed to ensure hospitals and other healthcare buildings operate as planned.

ASHE’s Health Facility Commissioning Handbook is a hands-on guide that provides details to help facility leaders implement the ASHE commissioning process both for construction projects and for existing facilities. ASHE introduced the only commissioning process specifically for healthcare facilities in its 2010 publication, Health Facility Commissioning Guidelines.

The guidelines are tailored to the commissioning process specifically to healthcare 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.

The new handbook transforms theory into practice. Healthcare organizations that take on the ASHE commissioning process will be able to:

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

The handbook is available at www.ASHEstore.com.