How Digital Twins can Future-Proof Healthcare Facilities

By: Jacob D’Albora and Michael Paciero

Your facilities team is reconfiguring a surgical suite to accommodate a new robotic system. You’re juggling HVAC loads, infection control zones, and compliance documentation. All while tomorrow’s surgeries depend on it. Another day in the new normal of healthcare operations.

For Facilities and Operations leaders, the only thing that doesn’t change is that everything changes. But in most cases, the data infrastructure hasn’t kept pace. Most hospitals still operate on fragmented, static models that treat buildings like concrete, steel, and glass.

Which they are. But if it wasn’t clear before, it has become painfully clear now: your building is not a static thing. It’s a dynamic, living ecosystem. One that has to adapt and evolve as the needs of your patients and staff do.

Historically trying to keep up with this has fallen on the shoulders of a few facility experts that know the building like the back of their hand. But how do you do this in an ever increasingly paced and technology filled world? And how do you do it without disrupting patient care, or breaking your budget, or compromising on safety and compliance?

We think the answer lies in the increased use of Digital Twins. We believe this technology, when used to its fullest, has the ability to revolutionize how we design, build, and operate healthcare facilities.

In this article we’ll explore what digital twins are and how forward-thinking healthcare leaders are using them to become more proactive and data-driven. And we’ll talk about how you can begin to take advantage of digital twins in your own facilities and the pitfalls to look out for along the way.

The Unyielding Demands on Healthcare Facilities

Healthcare facilities are possibly the most complex and dynamic built environments to manage. Unlike a typical commercial building, a hospital is a 24/7 operation. One where operational continuity and quality is quite literally matter of life and death.

As a facilities leader, you are constantly getting pressure from multiple fronts:

• Strategic shifts in programming, forcing you to reimagine how space is used as care models evolve. We’ve seen this firsthand on projects like Northwell where a floor was reconfigured, even after design documents were complete, as teams re-evaluated how the space should function and new technology came online.
• Integrating new medical equipment that requires significant planning (and often disruptive and costly retrofits.)
• The complex and seemingly ever-changing regulatory environment places additional compliance hurdles on you, from infection control to energy efficiency.

While your existing tech stack can and does help, it’s usefulness is often mitigated. Traditional Building Management Systems (BMS) and Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS), while valuable, often operate in data silos. Each system tells part of the story (energy, maintenance, equipment), but never the whole picture.

The Digital Twin: A New Operating System for Your Facility

Now, imagine a living, breathing digital replica of your entire facility. A model that is not just a static 3D blueprint, but a dynamic, data-rich environment that mirrors the real-time performance of your buildings.

A growing number of hospitals have this now in the form of digital twins. Living, data-rich replicas of their facilities that show how their systems perform in real time.

A digital twin integrates data from all your existing systems (BMS, CMMS, IoT sensors, even clinical systems) into a single platform. It gives you creates a holistic, real-time view of your entire operation. And it creates the foundation for a new, proactive approach to managing your facilities.

A Digital Twin creates a host of opportunities:

You can understand your building, and manage change with confidence.

The most immediate value of a digital twin is knowing with confidence what already exists.

For most hospitals, that’s half the battle. The data needed to plan even a simple renovation (where systems are located, what the clearances are, etc.) is scattered across old drawings, PDFs, and staff memory. A digital twin consolidates all of that into one model, giving your team a single, accurate view of current conditions.

You can test changes.

What happens if we install a new MRI machine? How will it impact our HVAC and electrical systems? What is the most efficient way to reconfigure a ward to accommodate a new clinical service?

A digital twin can give you the integrated data ecosystem to build simulations like these on top of. While it requires some additional work, having the foundation in place allows you to simulate the impact of proposed changes before a single alteration is made. You can test the impact of new equipment. Model different layouts and patient flows. Plan for future expansion.

Continuous commissioning.

Digital twins don’t just help simulate major changes. They can be used to monitor and optimize building systems on an ongoing basis. By giving you a real-time feed of data from your building, it can serve like a central command for your facility.

Instead of waiting for an alarm to sound, it can detect deviations in equipment performance that might signal signal a potential failure.

It can analyze energy use in real-time and surface ways to optimize HVAC, lighting or other systems. One review of digital twin applications found energy savings of up to 30%.

It can be the single source of truth for your compliance documentation, automatically logging performance data and generating reports for adherence.

Suggestions on How To Start

If your facility team is starting to explore digital twins, the best next step isn’t to buy software. As with any digital transformation initiative, this is fundamentally a change management situation. Your first task is to build internal alignment. A few suggestions on how to do that:

• Leverage a major capital project as your launch point. Most organizations begin their digital twin journey during a major capital project. You already have funding in place. Design and construction teams are actively generating data. You can intentionally collect and structure that right the first time. If you have a project like that on the horizon, treat it as your foundation for long-term facility intelligence.
• Start with a single use case. If you don’t have a major project coming up and want to implement in an existing facility, it’s best to walk before you run. Identify a use case that causes material friction for your team. For example, how can your facilities team get instant access to accurate equipment data to fix issues faster? Or how can your Capital Projects team use verified existing conditions to plan and execute renovations more efficiently? Doing so can demonstrate immediate value and build trust, while laying the groundwork for broader digital twin adoption.
• Map what data already exists. You can’t incorporate data that doesn’t exist. Look at your BMS, CMMS, IoT sensors, and asset management systems. You need to know where data lives, how clean it is, and who owns it.
• Engage both construction and operations early. The handoff between the two is often where digital twin efforts fail. Bring everyone into the same room early on to define handover standards and governance.
• Build a compelling business case. Digital twin investments should be considered lifecycle cost avoidance, not new spend. Treat them as such.

The Future of Facility Management

The way hospitals operate is changing. The demands placed on buildings have outgrown the systems used to manage them.

Digital twins don’t solve for all of this by themselves. But they can play a key role in building a framework for continuous improvement. They allow you to see how buildings are performing, anticipate what’s next, and adapt without disruption.

VIATechnik can help organizations like yours develop and implement a digital twin strategy. Whether it is through our Digital Twin Consulting Services or our specialized BIM for Facilities Management offerings, we can provide the expertise and the tools to turn your facility data into actionable intelligence.