Healthcare energy management: A digital approach

Healthcare is a sensitive sector with the potential risk to human life as a focus. Hospitals are an integrated and critical subset of healthcare services. The energy utilized at hospitals is critical and the ability to predict hospital energy utilization is important, most especially under constrained demand or to migrate to a renewable source. The energy demand at hospitals is dependent on various variables including climate, equipment, utilization (occupancy), technological enablement and other. The ability to model the entire hospital's energy demand inclusive of all activity, administrative, emergency, surgical, utilities, and testing makes for a significant challenge. This research renders the activity of the hospital via business processes. Adopts business processes to model all activities at a hospital and proceeds to adopt AI as a tool to develop a single objective function able to predict energy utilization at a hospital. The results provide for scenarios and model validation indicating a 98% accuracy.