Hospital and healthcare services need to be available for us 24/7. Any event that interrupts availability can impact entire communities, even putting lives at risk. Basically, reliable healthcare services are dependent upon power resilience in facility infrastructures. Here, we take a look at the subject of Using IoT and BMS to Improve Power Resilience in Hospitals.
Why is power resilience important?
A recent study of 33 hospitals across 10 countries found that “unreliable power was the single most common cause of medical equipment failure. This can be the supply quality due to harmonics, or the complete loss of power. An electrical power supply is not the only risk factor that can also affect the continuity of healthcare services.
Schneider Electric identifies five important steps to take to ensure your healthcare infrastructure resists, recovers from, and adapts to threats. In particular, how IoT-enabled power and building management systems have a role to play.
1. Ensuring power resilience
Electrical power problems, including poor power quality and lack of discrimination can interrupt surgical procedures and patient care. Conditions like harmonics and voltage fluctuations can cause malfunctions threatening patient safety and reducing the life of sensitive medical equipment.
Advancements in technology and digitisation make it possible for health systems engineers to take a proactive approach to power availability. Innovations in power quality metering and energy management software, condition-based maintenance and microgrids enable health systems to prepare for and prevent power quality problems before equipment damage or downtime occurs.
Strengthen cyber defences.
While digitalisation enhances many aspects of healthcare, it also comes with an increased risk of cyberattacks. Globally, 75% of healthcare organisations have experienced cyberattacks, and the trend is increasing. Operational technology must be cyber secure by design, and protect the network layer where devices communicate. A single breach can cost millions of pounds and take a long time to recover.
Consider using remote services.
Increasingly, hospitals are relying on remote operations to build facility resilience. Remote operations connect off-site specialists to high-quality facility data to help predict, pre-empt, and prevent building management system failure. They can also prioritise condition-based maintenance over routine maintenance and be faster to adapt.
Remote services can also identify and resolve most issues before the facility team even knows the issues exist. This increases uptime, extends asset longevity, improves workforce safety and use, and ensures resilience.
Establish a flexible infrastructure.
A healthcare organisation must be functional whilst responding to changing patient or population needs, so it is crucial to ensure that any infrastructure solution can adapt to changing requirements over time.
The newest IoT-enabled power resilience and energy management solutions like EcoStruxure use open, flexible digital platforms to connect data across different systems. Furthermore, this supports access to new devices and recent technologies and simplifies system reconfigurations and responses to critical events.
Increase asset protection.
Condition-based maintenance will keep mission-critical electrical and building infrastructure assets running and increase maintenance efficiency up to 40%. Moreover, knowing the condition of critical assets will help reduce the risk of electrical failures up to 75%.
How to achieve healthcare resiliency?
EcoStruxure for Healthcare is a future-ready, integrated, interoperable platform that drives better resilience. Its IoT-enabled, cybersecure infrastructure includes power and building management dashboards and analytics for a complete range of remote digital and advisory services.
Finally, learn more by downloading the eGuide ‘How IoT solutions deliver exceptional resilience for extraordinary healthcare’.
