The American Society for Health Care Engineering (ASHE), a professional membership group of the American Hospital Association, announced Geisinger is the winner of the 2026 Excellence in Health Care Facility Management (FM Excellence) Award.
Each year, the FM Excellence Award recognizes individuals or facilities teams that implement new or innovative programs or processes to optimize the healthcare physical environment and improve patient care.
Headquartered in Danville, Pa., Geisinger is a regional health system with 10 hospital campuses and more than 130 primary and specialty care clinics throughout Pennsylvania. Over the past decade, the health system has introduced a comprehensive monitoring-based commissioning program across its network to improve system performance, enhance clinical environments, and establish a scalable, analytics-informed approach to facilities management. The program integrates retrocommissioning projects in 12 hospital buildings with ongoing monitoring-based commissioning programs in 23 facilities in the system’s northeastern, central, and western regions.
The program was deployed as a collaborative effort between Geisinger and the energy solutions company Envinity and executed by a team of controls vendors and mechanical contractors including JCI, Valley T&B, Penn State Mechanical, and NRG Controls. The SkySpark analytics platform hosts a centralized cashflow and measurement/verification framework for the organization that tracks system performance, identifies faults, and validates savings over time.
Since 2016, the system has completed 16 retro-commissioning and optimization initiatives in its hospitals, ambulatory facilities, and central utility plants. To date, Geisinger has saved more than $4.05 million in operating costs since tracking began in 2017; this includes more than $2.33 million in verified cost savings from retrocommissioning projects (yielding a 1.6-to-1 savings-to-cost ratio) as well as $183,000 in annual cost avoidance through monitoring-based commissioning.
The program has also delivered measurable impact on clinical outcomes, including optimizations to HVAC systems that support patient comfort and infection control, custom dashboards that provide better in-room condition monitoring and enable streamlined compliance, and enhanced overall system reliability. The phased implementation approach uses a standardized process that follows a repeatable model, enabling scalability across the enterprise for both new builds and existing infrastructure.
“Geisinger Health’s initiative is especially notable in that it doesn’t just produce a single win; it continuously manages utility costs,” said Robert Baird, associate vice president of facilities and operations for University of Florida Health and chair of ASHE’s Awards and Recognition Task Force. “In the facilities world, managing costs continuously, not weeks or months after an incident, is being proactive and fiscally responsible. This project is certainly an example of excellence.”