When you visit a physician with an ailment, you want a diagnosis based on facts and on the result of tests. You don’t want your doctor to say, “Let’s try this and see if it works!” If you own or manage a healthcare facility, you want to make infrastructure decisions based on data rather than on gut feelings.
That’s particularly true these days, with the changing face of healthcare facilities. Years ago, healthcare took place in a doctor’s small private office, or in a larger hospital that had its own full-time, professional, in-house maintenance personnel. Part of the impact of the Affordable Healthcare Act and of medical specialization is the proliferation of outpatient and stand alone, multi-site health care related facilities. If you’re responsible for the operation and management of these kinds of facilities, you may use in-house maintenance or outsource that maintenance to a trusted service provider. Or you may have an in-house maintenance department for everyday service and maintenance while you cover major systems maintenance (such as HVAC are) with qualified outside experts.
Building Automation and Building Management systems are a must in this kind of environment. With enterprise-level controls, remote managers can observe and service a number of standalone buildings from a single remote location. And these managers are able to make decisions based on real-time utility and analytics from a modern building automation and energy management system. They’re not guessing at how the system is performing—they know what’s going on because they have current, accurate data. Furthermore proactive dispatching of mobile maintenance resources can happen without effecting local site medical and administrative personnel.
Major advances in building automation systems with regard to hospital energy management include:
- Development of more comprehensive energy management software that incorporates advanced algorithms for demand-based control of building systems;
- Continued growth in the areas of systems integration and the utilization of cloud technologies for data storage and computing;
- The ability to gather data from building systems and equipment that allow for continuous commissioning and more intelligent services, increasing the reliability of these systems and productivity of facilities personnel.
Of course, maintenance is only part of the equation when managing facilities. Managers need to be aware of a systems efficiency and performance. That’s why the need for real‐time electric demand interval data (kW trend data) is urgent and growing.
One of the best ways to obtain real‐time data of a Health Care facility’s electricity use is to use a “shadow meter” in parallel with the utility’s meter or by getting a pulse signal from the utility’s electric meter tied to the Buildings BAS. That way managers can measure and validate the energy-consuming systems in their buildings.
Effective management of healthcare facilities doesn’t always allow for full-time, on-site personnel. But it also can’t work effectively using “gut decisions” that aren’t based on real and accurate data.
