By Dan Hounsell

Bluewater Health based in Sarnia, Ontario, has implemented the Honeywell Forge enterprise performance management solution at its hospitals in Petrolia and Sarnia. The software as a service (SaaS) solution is helping Bluewater Health reduce the building’s operational costs and improve building resilience.

As one of the most sustainable and innovative hospitals in Ontario, Bluewater invested in cutting-edge technologies and underwent a digital transformation for its renovated facility in Sarnia and its 110-year-old location in Petrolia. Honeywell worked with the organization to deploy Honeywell Forge digitized maintenance to analyze and optimize building systems maintenance at the hospital. The solution recommends early and preventive actions based on live and historical data to avoid costly, unnecessary changes and reduce unplanned, reactive work on building systems. As a result, the hospital’s usage of electricity and natural gas have decreased by optimizing systems in real time, despite rising energy needs due to additional medical equipment and increased occupancy.

“Innovation and sustainability are significant areas of focus for us, and Honeywell Forge is an important solution that is enabling us to lower our operational maintenance costs and be more efficient,” said Alex Sullo, Bluewater Health’s director of biomedical and support services. “It also gives us a solution that we can embed across our overall building systems and integrate protocols at a higher level to drive the digital transformation of our buildings. Knowing our facilities are efficient and ready to perform at the highest standards allows our organization to focus on providing safe, quality care to the residents of Sarnia-Lambton.”

Using Honeywell Forge, Bluewater Health can pull thousands of building maintenance data points into one dashboard and receive real-time analysis of building performance. The plant maintenance team now can manage the building through a proactive maintenance process of curated recommendations. Honeywell Forge digitized maintenance is providing Bluewater Health with new insights from more than 1,200 equipment inputs in the building, showing building performance and finding opportunities for improvement before small problems become big issues. Forge has also helped Bluewater reduce electricity usage by an average of 8 percent of expected consumption and reduce gas usage by almost 12 percent against their target over the first few months of the deployment.

“The value of predictive maintenance, much like preventive medicine, is being able to tackle future problems before they become serious and costly issues,” said Laura Laltrello, Honeywell’s vice president and general manager of North America Services. “As many hospitals face clinical, operational and budget challenges, they need greater dependability for their equipment and to get more out of their existing infrastructure. Honeywell Forge is helping Bluewater meet its critical operational needs and provide better insight into its systems which is enabling more time focusing on delivering key outcomes for their patients.”

Bluewater Health’s hospital in Sarnia is one of Canada’s first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified hospitals. The sustainable design includes an underground cistern to collect rainwater, a gray water system for toilets, a state-of-the-art chiller and an upcoming combined heat and power generating plant. Its Petrolia hospital is undergoing extensive redevelopment with a new high-efficiency boiler plant, upgraded electrical infrastructure and emergency power system.

Honeywell Forge is purpose-built on a native edge-to-cloud, data-driven architecture designed to accelerate digital transformation of operations.