Condition-Based Maintenance: Avoiding Early Asset Lifecycle Events in Healthcare Facilities

An effective asset management and maintenance strategy is crucial in healthcare settings, where patient well-being depends on the uninterrupted availability of critical equipment. Hospitals and critical care facilities rely on an intricate network of medical life-support systems and HVAC units working together to ensure optimal conditions for occupants and visitors. 

Traditional reactive and preventive maintenance strategies fall short in these high-stakes environments. Reactive maintenance leads to costly emergency repairs and service disruptions, while preventive maintenance relies on fixed schedules rather than actual asset conditions — resulting in unnecessary maintenance and resource inefficiencies. Without a proactive data-driven approach, facilities are subject to unexpected breakdowns, putting operational efficiency and patient outcomes at risk.

This is where a Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) strategy emerges as the perfect solution. In this article, you’ll learn how CBM is transforming asset management in healthcare facilities, diving into Sodexo’s success story at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, where 85 early asset lifecycle events were successfully prevented — improving reliability, cost-efficiency, and delivery of patient care.

The Importance of Condition-Based Maintenance in Healthcare Facilities

In healthcare settings, where equipment failures can have life-threatening consequences, condition-based maintenance provides a proactive approach to asset management. Unlike traditional time-based maintenance, which follows fixed schedules regardless of actual equipment condition, CBM continuously monitors asset performance to help hospital maintenance teams detect early signs of potential failures and take preemptive action. With data-driven insights and analytics, healthcare facilities can ensure critical equipment remains available when it matters most and avoid early lifecycle failures that disrupt capex planning. 

Benefits of Condition-Based Maintenance in Healthcare

The shift from planned to condition-based maintenance has several benefits in healthcare operations including failure prevention, cost optimization, reliability improvements, and enhanced patient care delivery. 

1. Reduced Unplanned Downtime
CBM allows hospitals to identify and address asset issues before they escalate into failures, ensuring continuous operation of vital medical equipment, HVAC systems, and backup power units. This minimizes disruptions in patient care and eliminates costly emergency repairs that strain resources.

2. Capex Management and Cost Savings
By focusing on condition-based interventions rather than routine servicing, CBM helps reduce unnecessary maintenance costs. It also prevents premature asset replacements, optimizes energy consumption, and lowers the risk of unplanned capital expenditure, leading to significant long-term financial savings for healthcare facilities.

3. Enhanced Patient and Visitor Experience
Failures in hospital infrastructure—such as climate control, air quality, and ventilation—can compromise patient comfort, safety, and staff efficiency. CBM ensures a seamless hospital experience, reducing the likelihood of disruptions that could impact patient recovery, visitor comfort, and overall hospital reputation.

4. Improved Asset Health and Lifespan
By detecting issues early and implementing timely corrective actions, CBM helps prevent excessive wear and tear on hospital assets. This improves asset health and extends the lifespan of medical and infrastructural equipment, reducing frequent replacements and improving return on investment.

5. Increased Asset Reliability / Availability
With real-time monitoring and automated alerts, maintenance teams can prioritize repairs based on actual asset conditions, ensuring that critical equipment remains fully functional. This leads to higher asset uptime, improving hospital efficiency and ensuring uninterrupted medical services.

Case Study: How Sodexo Prevented Early Lifecycle Events Through Condition-Based Maintenance at MFT Healthcare Complex

Background: Sodexo Health & Care provides Hard FM & Engineering Services at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), one of the largest acute NHS Trusts in the UK, managing thousands of critical assets across multiple sites. As a provider of essential healthcare services, MFT relies on the continuous operation of medical equipment, HVAC systems, and energy infrastructure to ensure patient safety and hospital efficiency.

The Challenge: As MFT’s service provider, Sodexo faced a fragmented view of asset performance data, making it difficult to identify early warning signs of failures. Maintenance teams lacked a unified system to monitor asset health in real-time, leading to reactive maintenance, increased downtime, and higher operational costs. To enhance efficiency and reliability, Sodexo needed a proactive, data-driven approach to asset management.

The Solution: To address these challenges, Sodexo partnered with Xempla to implement a smart decision automation and condition-based maintenance system for asset performance management. This enabled real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and workflow automation, transforming Sodexo’s maintenance strategy at MFT from reactive to proactive condition-based maintenance.

1. Data and Systems Integration

• Connected 2,000+ critical assets and streamed over 12,000 data points every 15 minutes into Xempla’s platform.
• Integrated with IBM Maximo, ensuring that technicians received automated work orders and specific maintenance recommendations on their mobile devices for swift corrective action.

2. Proactive Monitoring

• Any electrical or mechanical asset streaming operational data was integrated with Xempla, enabling the team at Sodexo to move from a reactive to a proactive service.
• Xempla’s proven DIIV (Discover, Investigate, Implement, Verify) framework was applied to detect early-stage anomalies, optimize maintenance workflows, and prevent potential failures.

3. Holistic Asset Performance Management

• Within weeks of onboarding and connecting BMS data, Xempla provided early insights into asset performance deviations from Functional Design Specifications, prompting Sodexo’s engineering team to take timely action. 
• The mobilization of Xempla’s holistic asset performance management and maintenance capabilities delivered greater visibility and confidence that critical assets operate reliably and do not cause unexpected clinical failure.

Outcomes Achieved

• Avoided Early Lifecycle Events – Prevented 85 potential asset failures, ensuring continuous operation of critical healthcare equipment.
• Delivered Energy and Cost Savings – Achieved £311,000 in energy savings and reduced electricity consumption by 1 million kWh.
• Reduced Environmental Impact – Reduced carbon emissions by over 2,000 tonnes, supporting sustainability goals.
• Enhanced Asset Reliability – Prevented 69 critical asset outages, improving hospital operations and asset uptime.

By implementing Xempla’s data-driven AI-first approach to condition-based maintenance, Sodexo successfully optimized asset performance, reduced costs, and ensured the highest level of operational reliability in a high-stakes healthcare facility like MFT.

Implementing Condition-Based Maintenance in Healthcare Facilities

Successfully adopting condition-based maintenance in healthcare facilities requires a strategic approach, integrating technology, training personnel, and overcoming key challenges to ensure seamless asset monitoring, improved reliability, and long-term operational efficiency.

I. Steps to Adopt CBM

1. Asset Assessment: Hospitals must identify critical equipment—such as medical devices, HVAC systems, and backup power units—that require real-time monitoring. Assessing failure risks, performance history, and maintenance needs ensures that CBM implementation prioritizes assets with the highest impact on patient care and operations.

2. Technology Integration: Deploying IoT sensors, AI-powered analytics, and automated maintenance platforms enables real-time monitoring of asset conditions. Seamless integration with existing CMMS or BMS ensures that maintenance teams receive automated alerts and actionable insights to optimize maintenance workflows and prevent failures.

3. Staff Training: Empowering maintenance teams with data interpretation skills and predictive maintenance expertise is crucial for a successful CBM strategy. Training should focus on analyzing sensor data, diagnosing early failure patterns, and executing timely interventions, ensuring a smooth transition from reactive to proactive maintenance.

II. Challenges and Considerations

1. Initial Investment: The cost of installing sensors, upgrading software, and training personnel can be a barrier. However, the long-term savings from reduced failures, lower maintenance costs, and extended asset lifespan make CBM a high-value investment for healthcare facilities.

2. Data Management: Ensuring accurate data collection, storage, and analysis is essential for CBM effectiveness. Hospitals need robust cybersecurity measures, cloud storage solutions, and AI-driven analytics to process large data volumes and generate meaningful, actionable insights for maintenance teams.

3. Change Management: Shifting from time-based to condition-based maintenance requires organizational alignment. Leadership must drive stakeholder buy-in, provide ongoing training, and implement gradual adoption strategies to ensure a smooth transition, minimizing resistance from maintenance teams accustomed to traditional methods.

Using AI and Automation to Deliver the Most Effective Healthcare CBM Strategy

Most strategies for condition-based maintenance today are manual-heavy, suffer from data fragmentation, and don’t optimize for the operations and maintenance process as a whole. Repetitive tasks like triaging, diagnostics, and work order management don’t justify complete human involvement at this point. Siloed tools and collaboration systems prevent seamless information flow, delaying and impairing decisions. As asset portfolios grow, these challenges become more pronounced, making conventional CBM increasingly inadequate for modern needs. Especially in fast-paced, high-stakes healthcare environments. This is where AI-driven CBM solutions like Xempla represent a fundamental shift from slow and manual workflows to a proactive, scalable, and highly efficient approach. 

How Xempla Enhances Condition-Based Maintenance for Healthcare Facility Management Teams

1️⃣ Seamless Integration & Centralized Data
Xempla integrates effortlessly with CMMS, BMS, SCADA, IoT, and work order systems, eliminating data silos. Its API-driven architecture ensures a unified data foundation, enabling real-time insights and automation without disrupting hospital IT infrastructure.

2️⃣ Remote Monitoring for Critical Assets
With multi-site healthcare operations, real-time remote asset monitoring is essential. Xempla’s AI-powered system detects anomalies, predicts failures, and provides actionable insights, allowing maintenance teams to respond proactively and minimize on-site disruptions.

3️⃣ Smart Alert Prioritization & Noise Reduction
Not all alerts need immediate action. Xempla’s AI-driven triaging filters out false alarms and prioritizes high-impact issues by analyzing sensor data and historical trends—helping hospital engineers focus on critical equipment failures rather than wasting time on low-risk alerts.

4️⃣ AI-Driven Decision Support for Engineers
Beyond flagging anomalies, Xempla provides real-time, context-aware recommendations based on sensor data and historical performance. This ensures hospital maintenance teams quickly diagnose issues and take corrective action without manually analyzing complex datasets.

5️⃣ Enhanced Team Collaboration for Faster Resolutions
Xempla connects technicians, engineers, and managers with context-rich insights and past resolutions, enabling better coordination in high-pressure hospital environments. This accelerates issue resolution and ensures continuous uptime of critical healthcare assets.

6️⃣ Standardized Workflows for Reliable Maintenance
Inconsistent maintenance leads to inefficiencies in hospitals. Xempla provides structured workflows and guided processes, ensuring every technician follows best practices, reducing errors, and improving operational reliability.

7️⃣ Knowledge Retention & Institutional Learning
As hospital teams evolve, retaining expertise is crucial. Xempla automatically captures resolutions, asset trends, and engineering insights, building a centralized knowledge base that enables new technicians to learn from past experiences.

8️⃣ AI-Enabled Automation for Leaner Operations
Xempla automates routine maintenance decisions by learning from user interactions and recommending pre-validated solutions. This minimizes human intervention in repetitive tasks, allowing healthcare maintenance teams to focus on strategic improvements while AI handles the rest.

Conclusion: Optimizing Healthcare Asset Management With AI-Driven CBM

Condition-Based Maintenance is transforming healthcare facility management by enhancing operational efficiency, reducing costs, and improving equipment reliability. By shifting from reactive to proactive maintenance, hospitals can prevent unexpected failures, extend asset lifespans, and ensure a safer environment for patients and staff.

As healthcare facilities become more complex, data-driven maintenance strategies are essential. AI-driven automation is revolutionizing CBM — moving from manual, time-intensive processes to intelligent, self-optimizing systems that detect anomalies, predict failures, and automate decision-making in real-time.

Facility managers must embrace AI-powered CBM solutions to drive operational excellence. The Xempla-Sodexo partnership at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust showcases the tangible impact of intelligent automation. Explore how you can help your facility achieve similar results—optimizing performance while ensuring uninterrupted patient care. Book a demo of our AI Reliability Agent to transform your healthcare CBM strategy today.