Enhancing Mass General Brigham’s Elevator Service

When a Mass General Brigham hospital takes an elevator out of service for repair, the downtime creates much more than an inconvenience. The resulting disruption can slow down patient transports within the hospital, delay the timely delivery of food and supplies and impede the floor-to-floor travel of patients, visitors, clinicians and staff.

“There is a real impact to hospital operations and, ultimately, to patient care if our patients and clinical and support staffs cannot efficiently get where they need to go,” said George Player, CPE, FMA, vice president, Facilities and Operations, Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

To keep our elevators and people moving, Player put together a systemwide team of facilities and operations leaders to develop and negotiate a new elevator vendor contract that improves service – reducing unforeseen downtimes – while lowering costs. Their work was part of  Sustain, a systemwide portfolio focused on helping Mass General Brigham achieve our sustainable financial performance goal by optimizing the way we work through resource stewardship and continual process improvement. 

“We didn’t want to renegotiate a contract like we have now because what we have now isn’t working. There is not the accountability that we need,” said Edward Pitts, CHFM, CLSS-HC, executive director of Facilities and Support Services, Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital. Pitts led Mass General Brigham’s Sustain elevator team, which included colleagues from our academic medical centers and community hospitals.

To provide the time they needed to develop a new contract, the team negotiated a 12-month extension of the system’s existing elevator contract with no escalation of cost. “That was a big win for us,” Pitts said, highlighting the team’s ability to freeze costs and avoid additional expense as they negotiated a new agreement that upended the status quo.

Elevating Mass General Brigham’s expectations for service

Historically, the system’s elevator service contracts have been one-sided, with the vendors dictating the terms and cost, a simple “Here’s what we’re going to do for you; here’s what you pay” transaction. But Pitts and the team looked to take a different approach with a new agreement. “We thought, why can’t we write our (Mass General Brigham’s) side into the contract?” Pitts said.

They drafted a contract that adds more accountability and, for the first time, includes key performance indicators (KPIs) and quality metrics that the vendor must live up to or face a financial penalty. The contract contains labor and maintenance/service rates that will help save the system hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and also adds transparency, requiring increased, regular communication to keep Mass General Brigham aware of the vendor’s work and progress in maintaining service and facilitating required testing and state inspections on time.

“We will know what they’re doing every step of the way,” Pitts said. “If they order a part, we will be aware of it.”  

In the early stages of developing the new contract, the Mass General Brigham team asked potential vendors to think of themselves as a partner with a critical role in helping to ensure the delivery of high-quality care across Mass General Brigham facilities. “We challenged them to think differently and understand their impact on patient care,” Pitts said.