Healthcare construction projects are complex orchestrations of architecture, engineering, clinical operations, and technology. While your internal IT team excels at keeping daily operations running smoothly, healthcare construction introduces a unique set of challenges that require specialized expertise. Understanding the warning signs early can help you determine whether your current structure will succeed or whether you need additional support.

Here are five indicators that your project might benefit from dedicated technology construction expertise, along with insights to help you assess your situation.

Red Flag #1: Your IT Team Is Already at 100% Capacity

Your IT department is already managing EHR optimization, cybersecurity threats, application upgrades,

clinical engineering systems, and countless help desk tickets. Now add a major construction project requiring technology planning, vendor coordination, infrastructure design reviews, and integration management.

Understanding Resource Demands: Healthcare construction technology demands vary dramatically across project phases. Early planning and design require effort to define requirements and review documentation. Installation and testing phases need constant coordination with multiple contractors and vendors. Go-live preparation is all-consuming. Construction projects create spikes in IT resourcing demand that are difficult to absorb with already-committed staff.

Accurately assessing the resource commitment requires understanding what applications, systems, and infrastructure your specific project includes, then mapping those needs across a multi-year timeline with varying intensity at different phases. If your IT leadership is struggling to articulate how much time and which expertise construction will require from the team, that uncertainty itself is a warning sign.

What to watch for: Design review deadlines getting missed, construction meetings attended without adequate preparation time, or IT requirements documented in rushed bullet points rather than comprehensive specifications. These are early indicators that construction needs are competing with operational priorities, and the competition will only intensify as the project progresses.

Red Flag #2: Communication Breakdowns Are Becoming the Norm

Different parties are giving you conflicting information about technology requirements, timelines, or responsibilities. The low-voltage contractor, technology designer, general contractor, and your IT team all have different understandings of the same scope item.

Why This Happens: Healthcare construction involves multiple parties who speak different professional languages. Architects think in space and design. General contractors focus on schedules and sequencing. Technology designers work in systems and specifications. IT teams operate in networks, applications, and system workflows. Clinical staff communicate in patient care processes and workflows.

Common confusion points include where one contractor's scope ends and another begins, who provides equipment versus infrastructure, which systems require integration, and who manages those integrations, and when IT needs access to spaces versus when construction considers them "complete."

What to watch for: The same questions resurfacing in different meetings with different groups. Assumptions are being made about who is handling specific items. Scope items that everyone thought someone else was managing. Finger-pointing when deliverables are missed.

The Underlying Issue: When you find yourself constantly clarifying the same items or mediating between parties with different interpretations of the same requirement, you are spending valuable time on coordination that needs a systematic structure. Healthcare construction requires someone who fluently translates between these professional languages and clearly defines roles and responsibilities upfront.

Red Flag #3: Technology Healthcare Construction Budget Is Getting Squeezed (or Is a Complete Mystery)

Value engineering meetings are targeting technology line items with suggestions that "we can probably get by with less" or "maybe we don't need full redundancy in this area." Your technology requests are characterized as nice to have rather than essential infrastructure. Or perhaps the opposite problem exists: nobody really knows what the technology budget should be, estimates vary widely, and hidden costs keep emerging.

The Defense Challenge: When technology items face value-engineering scrutiny, defending them requires articulating the operational impact if eliminated, demonstrating that post-construction additions cost significantly more than including them now, identifying regulatory or compliance requirements, and explaining patient safety or care-quality implications. Without someone at the decision-making table who can make these cases effectively in language that resonates with construction and finance stakeholders, technology infrastructure gets treated as discretionary spending.

What to watch for: Technology budget discussions where IT is asked to "sharpen the pencil" without a clear understanding of what would be eliminated. Percentages that seem low compared to the technology intensity of the facility being built. Frequent surprises about costs that weren't included in planning.

Red Flag #4: You're Making Technology Decisions Without Understanding Long-Term Implications

Decisions being made today in coordination meetings will impact your operations for decades, but they are being made quickly to keep the project moving without full consideration of long-term consequences.

Critical Long-Term Decisions: Conduit and pathway sizing affects your ability to add capacity in the future. Infrastructure room locations and sizing determine whether you can expand equipment. Power and cooling capacity in technology spaces limits what systems you can support. Wireless infrastructure density impacts how many devices you can deploy. Network architecture and redundancy levels define your operational resilience.

The Hidden Challenge: These decisions require specialized knowledge at the intersection of healthcare operations, IT strategy, construction implementation, and technology trends. Understanding how today's choices enable or constrain tomorrow's capabilities is not intuitive. Emerging technologies that might become standard in five years need consideration now when infrastructure is being installed, not later when modification becomes expensive.

What to watch for: Design decisions being finalized in coordination meetings without anyone asking what happens if capacity needs increase, how emerging technologies might use the infrastructure, what the operational impact is if systems fail, or how difficult and expensive modification will be post-construction.

The Real Issue: If technology decisions are made primarily based on the construction schedule, without deep healthcare IT construction expertise evaluating those recommendations against operational needs, you risk costly limitations that won't become apparent until after you occupy the facility.

Red Flag #5: Nobody Owns the Complete Technology Picture

Different aspects of technology are being managed by different groups with no single point of coordination. Technology designer handles infrastructure. Medical equipment planner handles clinical devices. IT manages network and applications. Clinical engineering deals with medical systems. Facilities handles building automation. Each group is executing their scope competently, but nobody is ensuring all these pieces integrate seamlessly or tracking how decisions in one area impact another.

Where Integration Fails: Nurse call systems need to connect to communication devices. Medical devices must connect to EHR for data integration. Access control needs to interface with staff duress systems. Building automation must coordinate with IT environmental monitoring. Real-time location systems integrate with multiple clinical applications. When these connections are not coordinated by someone with end-to-end visibility, gaps emerge.

What to watch for: Scope gaps where everyone assumed someone else was handling integration. Duplicated efforts where multiple groups are working on related items without coordination. Equipment arriving when the infrastructure to support it is not ready. Systems designed with incompatible assumptions about how they will work together.

The Coordination Challenge: In healthcare construction, technology is not a single discipline but rather the integration point for multiple disciplines. Success requires someone thinking holistically about how all these pieces work together in actual clinical operations, not just how each piece meets its individual specification in construction documents. Without that oversight, you get components that each work individually but fail to deliver integrated operational capability.

Understanding What You're Facing

If you are experiencing one or two of these red flags, you have identified areas needing attention. If you are seeing three or more, the complexity likely exceeds what your current structure can manage effectively.

The question is not whether these challenges exist in healthcare construction projects. They do, universally. The question is whether your organization has the specialized expertise, dedicated capacity, and systematic coordination to address them successfully. Some organizations build that capability internally. Others recognize that healthcare construction technology management is a specialized discipline that benefits from dedicated expertise.

Healthcare construction projects succeed when organizations honestly assess their capabilities early and structure their teams accordingly. Recognizing these patterns is the critical first step toward making that assessment.

Equinox HIT is Your HIT Construction Partner.

Ready to discuss your specific project situation and explore whether a Technology Owner's Representative fits your needs? Contact us to schedule a consultation.

This article was developed by the Equinox HIT Team with editorial assistance from AI tools and re-reviewed by the Equinox HIT Team for accuracy and alignment with our standards.