Insights from the Floor: ASHE Health Care Innovation Conference 2025

The FSI team recently attended the 2025 ASHE Health Care Facilities Innovation Conference in Columbus, Ohio, connecting with facility leaders from across the country for four days of education, networking, and insights on how healthcare maintenance teams can optimize the healthcare built environment.

Through conversations at the FSI booth, educational sessions, and time spent outside of the exhibit hall, a theme became clear: the role of healthcare facility maintenance is transforming. As the industry evolves, so do the goals of teams on the ground. Modern facility teams are expected to manage complex compliance landscapes, proactively mitigate risk, and deliver strategic insights to leadership, all while ensuring safe, efficient environments. Let’s break down FSI’s top takeaways from ASHE HFIC — and how we’re helping customers prepare for the future.

During exhibit hours, the FSI team spoke with hundreds of attendees — hearing about their team priorities, frustrations, and needs from their software tools. Common threads were raised, with many discussions around asset data integrity, compliance readiness, and the need for smarter workflows. The consensus? Software tools, especially CMMS and EAM platforms, must evolve. Attendees echoed a clear shift in mindset: it’s no longer about simply tagging assets and setting up work orders. The tools at hand must support proactive maintenance, help ensure compliance, and enable data-driven decision making.

FSI is proud to be part of the transformation — offering purpose-built tools that take a CMMS beyond task tracking to empower teams with a strategic command center. As workflows shift toward more strategic and proactive actions, healthcare environments become safer and more resilient.

What Facility Teams Need to Know: Key Takeaways

• AI for Safer and More Efficient Operations: AI is no longer a buzzword, it’s a practical tool that HFM teams are ready to adopt. Healthcare facility management teams are beginning to use AI tools to streamline predictive maintenance, safety monitoring, and quality assurance without adding significant lift to an already-busy workforce. The product roadmap at FSI reflects the emerging application of artificial intelligence, with the recent addition of Analytics AI+ to the platform’s analytics module. This AI-powered digital assistant makes it more accessible to meaningfully utilize data with operational insights from natural-language questions, rather than requiring complex queries. 
   
• Digital Enablement at the Forefront: Digital twins, remote monitoring, and AI-based insights are revolutionizing facility operations with tech-enabled workflows and enhanced interoperability. The tools supporting HFM teams are becoming more advanced than ever, allowing lean teams to work smarter and with more transparency across databases. Software tools that don’t keep up will create operational bottlenecks – in the coming years, healthcare maintenance teams will benefit from choosing software providers that prioritize ongoing growth, not a one-and-done launch.
  
  
• Data Quality = Decision Quality: A common challenge in facility operations is reliability of a CMMS database, with inconsistent entries leading to inaccurate reporting. As data-informed decisions become a focus, teams are moving toward a more standardized approach for a foundation of clean data. Combating the effects of a messy database is challenging — often requiring a full audit to “reset” and pave the way for success moving forward. FSI ensures that customers have what they need to make impactful data-informed decisions, offering on-site data collections for a clean slate of asset information and dashboards built for the reporting that healthcare systems need. 

• Risk-Based Maintenance Strategies: Maintenance is shifting from time-based to impact-based, with predictive maintenance becoming a new standard. Prioritizing work based on asset criticality keeps operations focused, downtime of essential equipment low, and helps prioritize resource allocation. Trying to move toward predictive maintenance has long been a point of frustration for HFM teams working with messy asset documentation and work order systems that don’t serve them strategically. A CMMS built for healthcare services doesn’t just check the boxes of basic needs, it lays the foundation to dive deeper into operations and identify trends. With tools built for the unique needs and workflows of HFM departments, it’s simple to track and report on the metrics that matter. 

All Eyes on Joint Commission: Compliance Changes

One of the most common discussion topics at ASHE HFIC 2025 was compliance management considering recently announced changes to Joint Commission (JC) standards, with updates taking effect on January 1^st, 2026. JC is removing 714 requirements from the hospital accreditation program, introducing National Performance Goals (NPGs) that organize high-priority requirements into measurable topics, restructuring Environment of Care (EC) and Life Safety (LS) chapters into a single “Physical Environment” chapter, and making enhancements to the survey process, among other adjustments.

These changes are designed to align more closely with CMS’s Conditions of Participation and reduce administrative lift typically associated with compliance documentation — but with this shift comes new challenges. Facility professionals are now tasked with adjusting processes, schedules, and expectations to meet new standards.

Effectively navigating regulatory changes means staying informed and having a tool kit that is prepared to adapt to new priorities. As the industry as a whole shifts toward more transparency, better data, and digital enablement, there is opportunity to leverage these emerging focuses to confidently manage new workflows.

As a healthcare-specific CMMS/EAM, FSI is committed to supporting customers through every step of these changes — in the coming months, product enhancements will include adjustments to compliance-supporting features that align with new regulations, rather than requiring users to modify their instances on their own. We are striving to continue delivering solutions that make it simple to manage regulatory compliance, from centralizing data to automating essential reporting.

The landscape of healthcare facility management is changing rapidly, and support from intelligent tools is more crucial than ever. The teams that lean into the strategic capabilities of their technology and embrace a data-forward approach will lead the charge — and FSI’s CMMS is ready to support this evolution with modern tools that meet the specific needs of healthcare facilities teams.

Interested in hearing more on how FSI's suite of solutions empowers healthcare maintenance teams with purpose-built tools? Contact us here.