Ventia is a leading integrated facilities management partner for the health sector across Australia and New Zealand.
For more than 20 years, they have worked alongside private and public healthcare executives, operations teams and frontline staff to mobilise hospitals, manage operational risk and enhance the patient experience.
Ventia is committed to driving innovation through data-driven insights and solutions. One way they have achieved this is by utilising synthetic data.
Older hospitals evolve over decades – expansions, refurbishments and undocumented modifications add layers of complexity.
While operational teams maintain equipment effectively, legacy data doesn’t always tell the full story.
That lack of certainty is the real risk: assets may exist, but are they documented, compliant and visible?
Ventia set out to test whether technology could uncover those blind spots without physically setting foot inside a hospital.
Instead of relying on manual asset counts, they leveraged architectural and engineering data to create predictive logic.
Using Australian/New Zealand standards, schematics, engineering calculations and industry benchmarks, they created a model that mathematically predicts what assets should exist within a hospital.
The model compared predicted results with actual data, and the alignment is very encouraging:
- Fire and electrical assets achieved the strongest match, thanks to well-defined design rules and compliance requirements.
- HVAC and medical gases performed consistently, with small variations due to zoning and redundancy differences between facilities.
- Predictive accuracy was highest wherever drawings, SME input, and benchmarks were clean and consistent.
These results proved the concept works – technology can accurately mirror real-world conditions and highlight data gaps without invasive surveys.
The model doesn’t replace engineers; it amplifies their expertise by showing where to look first.
The model proved feasible and insightful, revealing how design, standards and human judgment shape asset data across hospitals – lessons that will guide future predictive modelling.
The numbers validated the concept, but the real takeaway was why some systems align perfectly while others vary.
- Design variance: No two hospitals are identical. Refurbishments and layout changes alter system configurations and asset density.
- Hidden dependencies: Systems are interlinked. Adjusting an HVAC zone can affect the number of fire dampers, sensors and control panels downstream.
- Regulatory layering: Different codes – Standards, Building Codes, Health Guidelines – create overlapping compliance expectations.
- Environmental factors: Conditions such as humidity, air-pressure regimes and redundancy influence complexity.
- Mathematical sensitivity: Small input changes, like how gross floor area or zones are defined, can alter outcomes. Calibration and clean data are essential.
This approach is less about predicting numbers and more about building confidence by providing hospital operators with a measurable, data-driven way to validate what they think they know. It can offer a baseline for asset validation, uncover compliance gaps early and improve cost forecasting – all measurable benefits for hospitals seeking value-driven solutions.
For more information about Ventia in the health sector, click here: https://www.ventia.com/health
