By Tom Willie / Special to Healthcare Facilities Today

The devastation brought by Hurricane Matthew and the upcoming anniversaries of Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy are stark reminders of how important energy resilience is to healthcare facilities. During Superstorm Sandy, three major New York City hospitals — NYU Langone, Bellevue and Coney Island — lost power due to backup generator failures, forcing the evacuation of more than 250 patients at the height of the storm.

Despite regulatory requirements for working backup power systems, unmonitored and inadequately tested backup generators still fail 20 to 30 percent of the time and 20 percent of hospitals fail their compliance testing because these systems are working inadequately. Preparing for emergencies that are all too common during hurricane season must include steps to ensure that backup power will kick in during crunch time, starting with around the clock monitoring and robust testing.

Without testing and monitoring of these systems in real time, facilities can only react to problems after they occur. Facility managers must send technicians to restart generators when they fail, and technicians are usually in high demand during extreme weather events. Distance is a major obstacle for multi-site healthcare campuses that can stretch for miles. The process of manually inspecting and repairing such problems creates its own issues: increased downtime, uncertainty around time-to-repair and higher staff costs. And of course when a generator fails, it’s already too late. Critical facilities can’t operate and staff must scramble to transport patients in dangerous conditions, putting lives at risk—a situation no hospital CEO or patient wants to find themselves in. 

Fortunately, we’re seeing major progress to improve hospital resilience through a raft of policy and industry initiatives. In recent years, the Joint Commission, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), National Fire Protection Association and other organizations have recommended or mandated more comprehensive emergency plans that include resilience requirements for backup power systems. More recently, Powered for Patients, a nonprofit group formed in the aftermath of Sandy, established a network of public health leaders, utilities, health care facility managers and other stakeholders to safeguard backup power and expedite power restoration for hospitals.

Identifying and investing in technology to comply with these new guidelines and initiatives is a daunting challenge for facility managers, but in a disaster ultimate responsibility will fall to the hospital’s Chief Executive Officer. How familiar is your CEO with the health and readiness of emergency systems in the basement? And, considering that hospitals are increasingly assembling intricate backup power networks that link together thermal or battery energy storage, diesel generators, combined heat and power, and more, their energy infrastructures are becoming more complex. More assets and complexity require more sophisticated technology to manage every piece of equipment that generates, switches, or consumes energy in a way that meets the latest regulations and avoids inevitable human error.

Fortunately, new technologies have emerged that rise to the challenge—specifically Energy Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. Energy IoT connects all energy equipment and systems to form a single network. With integrated monitoring and control, energy IoT platforms bring together all the crucial information that facility managers need to ensure functional and resilient backup systems. The most advanced platforms can connect all energy things, regardless of make, model, vintage or type, and connect them across multiple locations, making monitoring, maintenance and control easier and more affordable.

With automatic remote monitoring of all energy assets and systems linked over the energy IoT, compliance testing can be done from anywhere at any time, which results in better overall system upkeep. If a hospital experiences a grid-related outage and its emergency system kicks in and the action is recorded on a digital record, it can be counted as a test — which saves time and money. Remote monitoring also allows facilities to anticipate problems before they occur or address them before they get worse. In addition, the single point of monitoring and control offered by energy IoT boosts operational and energy efficiency to deliver significant cost savings from day one.

Some of the nation’s largest healthcare facilities, including a few affected by Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, have already deployed energy IoT systems and have realized considerable resilience and efficiency benefits as a result. And that’s just the beginning. By reinventing how we connect the complex and vital energy networks of a hospital, we can ensure compliance with new rules, reduce costs — and save lives by making catastrophic blackouts and chaotic evacuations a thing of the past.

Tom Willie is  the CEO of Blue Pillar.