Zombies Running Healthcare Facilities?

It began with a single word: zombies. Not the kind of walking dead creatures from late-night horror movies, but the kind that show up every day in healthcare facilities, hiding in plain sight.

For the Healthcare Facilities Network, zombies first appeared during a conversation with Michael Hatton, Vice President Facilities Engineering and Construction at Memorial Hermann Health System and 2025 ASHE President, and Dennis Ford, Enterprise Facilities Management at Advocate Health and 2026 ASHE President. During our conversation, Mike uttered the word zombies.

What are zombies? They are tasks, inspections, reports, habits, and meetings that continue long after their value has disappeared. They consume time, labor, and resources while delivering little improvement in operations, safety, reliability, or patient outcomes. Zombies are tolerated because they have always been tolerated. Nobody ever takes time to question their ongoing effectiveness.

Mike Hatton’s thoughts around zombies were direct: If we don’t eliminate outdated practices and tasks now, zombies, we risk hard‑coding them into and through the future through technology, automation, and AI.

The concept of “zombies” was introduced to Mike, Dennis, and the Healthcare Facilities Network (HFN) by New York Times best-selling author Diana Kander, the Keynote speaker at the 2025 ASHE Innovation Conference. Diana’s introduction of zombies struck a reactive chord among the thousands of attendees in Columbus, OH.

Once Diana explained what a “zombie” actually is, something that takes more time and energy to do than the value it creates, audience buy in was complete. For us in healthcare facilities, it was not a concept, but recognition of activities we have seen live and participated in. We have lived with zombies, built workarounds for them, and in some cases, helped perpetuate the zombies.

So, we planned a different kind of conversation for the Healthcare Facilities Network, something a little lighter. Not the usual aging employee, A360 update, or capital planning discussion. Something that might even get a laugh while it struck an acknowledging internal chord: A zombie discussion with Diana as the special guest, and Mike, Dennis, and CREF President Patrick Murphy representing healthcare facilities.

You don’t notice them at first. That’s the thing about zombies in healthcare facilities.
They don’t show up all at once. They build slowly. A process here. A requirement there.
A meeting that used to make sense. Something that worked at one point. And then over time, they became engrained in the department, in the organization, and in your daily work. They become something that no one ever really revisits. And over time, the zombies take hold until such time that someone asks: Why are we still doing this?

If nobody ever asks the question of why, the zombie will grow and grow. If you think about your job, you probably have familiar zombies in your department that have taken root and are impossible to shake. During our discussion, our panel of zombie hunters uncovered compliance, PDC, calendar, and deferred maintenance zombies. We will discuss each in upcoming articles.

 If you would like to watch the full Zombie discussion on the Healthcare Facilities Network, please watch here: 

Zombie Series Articles:

Part I: Zombies Running Healthcare Facilities 

Part II: The Compliance Zombie: Checking the box versus the Mission

Part III: PDC Watermelon projects, and Why they Keep Recurring in Healthcare

Part IV: The Quietest Zombie: Your Calendar

Part V: A Deferred Zombie: “We will fix it later”