Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust is partnering with Omni to use live building telemetry to monitor energy use at Darent Valley Hospital in Kent.
Darent Valley Hospital was built and is operated under the Private Finance Initiative scheme. The partnership will help joint estates teams identify problems earlier, reduce unnecessary energy use and waste, maintain buildings and equipment more effectively, and make better-informed decisions based on what is happening across the estate.
Jeanette Batten, director of estates, facilities, capital & PFI at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, said: “We’re pleased to be leading the way with this first ever telemetry deployment across an entire hospital estate. Our estate team will continue to drive the urgent need for live building data: technology already available to large real estate investment trusts across the globe. We will continue to share this groundbreaking work and the evidence of savings and efficiencies with all our colleagues across Kent & Medway and across the entire NHS. What we learn in the months ahead as the work progresses will impact positively on everyone involved in the provision of healthcare, clinical care, our community, and our environment.”
Alfie Crehan, director at Omni, said: “Darent Valley Hospital is an incredibly exciting deployment for Omni because this is about much more than simply collecting building data. We are creating a continuously evolving operational picture of the hospital – bringing together live telemetry from across its building services and turning an enormous volume of information into meaningful evidence for the estates team. That gives us the opportunity to identify emerging issues earlier, uncover inefficiencies that would otherwise be difficult to see, understand how assets and systems are actually behaving over time, and continually build a deeper understanding of the estate.
“Our ambition is to demonstrate a different way of understanding and operating complex healthcare estates – where thousands of individual building signals are brought together into a continuously developing source of operational intelligence. By combining engineering knowledge, live telemetry, and increasingly advanced analytics, we can help estates teams move from reacting to individual issues towards understanding the wider behaviour of their estate and making increasingly informed decisions around performance, energy, maintenance, and long-term investment. We’re delighted to be working with Jeanette and the wider team at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, and particularly excited that the learning from this programme can be shared to a wider NHS audience, as the work develops.”