Like many hospital campuses, the parking facilities closest to hospital entrances at TMC are reserved primarily for patients and visitors. Staff lots are typically accessed by proximity card readers managed via monthly contracts.
That doesn’t mean that doctors and nurses like parking further away. In fact, most hospital facilities departments know well that medical staff can sometimes encroach on visitor parking. Eggman relates a recent story how one employee wanted to pay for one of a select few monthly contracts available in a close-in garage only to be told there were no more available.
“He said he would just buy a visitor value pass,” Eggman says. “Obviously, that defeats the purpose. But I understand the need, because some of our providers and nurses are working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, and parking close-in would be one less thing to wear on them.
”The discussion did hatch an idea, however. Because the FLASH system utilizes enterprise cloud-based software, TMC was able to examine its parking data across the entire campus and come up with creative, solutions to bridge between needs and constraints.
“We could tell some facilities weren’t at capacity because of lower patient volumes due to COVID-19 ,” Eggman says. “We decided to offer up monthly staff contracts to the system for each of those facilities.”
The flexibility of the FLASH system made such an effort easy to turn around, providing a quick way to help keep providers happy despite putting in so many hours every day.