Data Standards for Health Care Facility Management and Design

In 2020 representatives of Yale New Haven Hospital, FGI, the American Society for Health Care Engineering (ASHE), the Construction Specifications Institute, the National Institutes of Health, and several other large and mid-sized health care systems across the United States took on a grassroots effort to bring consistency to the data standards used for health care facility management and design. The goal was to provide health care facility planners, designers, and operators with a common nomenclature to simplify maintenance of reliable building master records; streamline health care facility space and equipment management; increase compliance with regulatory requirements; provide consistent terminology in risk management; and support energy and operational benchmarking.

FGI and ASHE each formed a group to undertake a formal review of the classifications and align them with the FGI Guidelines and other existing standards. The FGI Nomenclature Topic Group reviewed the classifications for buildings, functional areas, and spaces in hospitals. A working group operating within ASHE’s Operational Excellence Committee developed classifications for building systems and building system assets.

A draft of the data classification format is available for public review on the FGI and ASHE websites; download the document below. The finalized data standards for functional areas and spaces in hospitals have been published in the 2022 FGI Guidelines for Design and Construction of Hospitals.

For more information about the development of the data standards, read the article about the initiative published in the October 2020 issue of Health Facilities Management magazine.

Health Care Facility Management Data Standards