Running a successful healthcare business involves a number of challenges, sometimes conflicting with one another but impossible to ignore. The primary challenge, of course, is guaranteeing adequate patient care—by itself a complex challenge, given the range of specialized environments involved, from examination rooms to operating theatres to radiology departments to patient rooms and beyond.
The second challenge is to support the well-being and effectiveness of the caregivers who work in the facility. They need to rely on having the proper circumstances to carry out daily operations correctly, efficiently, and safely.
To remain competitive and cost-effective, healthcare owners and operators also must find ways of continuously improving their operations. This means, among other things, keeping on the cutting edge of medical technology and adopting digital solutions that can streamline caregiving as much as possible.
This may seem surprising to the uninitiated, but connected LED lighting is one of the most effective and easily deployed of these digital solutions for continuously improving the quality of care. Lighting, both natural and artificial, influences human well-being visually, emotionally, and biologically:
- Visual effects are related to the quantity and quality of light, which directly influences staff performance in carrying out tasks, and patient well-being by giving them the light they need to recover and move around safely, especially at night.
- Emotional effects are related to the brightness, color, and intensity of light, which directly influences the sensations, moods, and subjective experiences of people in the illuminated environment.
- Biological effects are related to the non-visual photoreceptors located in the eye, which regulate the hormones cortisol (stress hormone) and melatonin (sleep hormone), influencing the human biological clock.
Many connected LED lighting solutions are specifically designed to support human well-being—either visually through quality and quantity of light, or via circadian rhythms through the kind of light (spectral content) delivered at different times of the day and night.
Lighting has to be wherever people are, and in a healthcare facility, this is often a 24/7/365 proposition. Energy consumption and related costs are therefore significant—another challenge that’s impossible to ignore. Connected LED lighting has a significant role to play here as well. In fact, the energy-efficiency argument is often compelling enough to prompt adoption on its own.
There’s an impression that connected LED lighting retrofits are cost-prohibitive, but the reality is otherwise: energy savings alone mean that LED lighting retrofits can offer an attractive ROI over a relatively short period of time. Then there are the more indirect benefits and savings that come along, if not for free, then for modest incremental costs that will pay for themselves over and over again in more effective staff and better patient outcomes.
