Enhancing the Efficiency of Healthcare Facilities Management with Digital Twins

Using digital twins for the healthcare industry has picked up pace with the various advances in technologies and capabilities that support creating digital twins and with the increased awareness of digital twins benefits for the industry. At a more specialized level, healthcare facilities management is an important and very critical component contributing to the effective and efficient planning and use of the facilities. Some work has been going on exploring how digital twins can be applied in some areas of healthcare facilities management such as maintenance and building management. However, there is very little exploring the use of digital twins in other areas of healthcare facilities management such as capacity planning, disaster recovery planning and facilities and resource scheduling. These areas can benefit tremendously from digital twins. In this paper we discuss the different aspects of healthcare facilities management where digital twins can be of great benefit. In addition, we show how using the digital twins and their accurate representations of the real healthcare systems can be integrated with other advanced tools like simulation, analytics and visualization to create more value-added capabilities to help enhance healthcare facilities management processes and outcomes. In particular, we believe that using the digital twin models and real-time operational data can be used as inputs for various simulation processes to help in the decision-making processes and to make better and more informed decisions regarding the various activities in healthcare facilities management.