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How can Hospitals Achieve Resilience with UPS Power Supplies? Posted: April 11, 2017 @ 1:24 pm |
Health care is the most important sector for us. But destructive outages do not discriminate. If you look back at the past, you would find how hospitals had suffered widespread power loss for several times. This is obviously not expected. Hospitals are one of those establishments where power supply should not be cut even for 10 minutes. Whenever a natural calamity takes place, hospitals play a vital role to give life back to countless affected people. Hospitals should be the first responder in the face of such a challenge. That is why hospitals should have all the essential protections to combat a natural calamity. Each hospital should have ups power supplies. It is sad but a true fact that sometimes Emergency Power Supply Systems (EPSS) or backup generators can fail. A study has revealed that almost 23% generators fail during a power failures. Can you remember how some of the hospitals in New York City suffered for power outage despite having the backup systems during the terrific Hurricane Sandy? What are the main reasons of such power failure? Many systems couldn't work because of certain issues relayed to storm while others simply did not have sufficient fuel to serve to the end during a dangerous outage. Patients had to move and the city witnessed a helpless condition of the health care sector. When health care establishments consider resiliency, what comes to the mind first is the physical issues of the system like hardening the power grid, position of he genera tors, and flood mitigation. With environmental and physical factors, software also affects the resiliency. Some new platforms are emerging that provide visibility into the “real time operational health and readiness”. These features make the systems more efficient and resilient. Now let's try to find out how the hospitals can achieve such things. Energy IoT:If you want to increase the resiliency of a hospital or other similar establishments, you should connect its energy assets (situated behind the meter). It will help you to monitor them round the clock and assure you that they will function properly during an outage. There are some ups power supplies that are made of aging equipment, used years ago. Monitoring and testing and requires a team of professional inspectors who can check each piece of the system with stopwatch and clipboard. It is found that legacy assets having remote monitoring process sometimes fail to interact with other parts of the same system. New equipment is able to interact with other parts successfully. Energy IoT or Energy network of things platform can resolve these issues efficiently. Real time data & monitoring:After connecting the energy assets, Energy IoT platforms collect, access, and visualize the real time agency data. It helps an operator to be aware of real time situations (battery voltage, fuel tank level of the equipment). You can accomplish testing remotely with a live video feed, along with real-time health data from generators and other devices. It is very important because a generator sometimes might not work properly despite having backup systems. The reasons might be shortage of fuel, battery level, oil pressure, or coolant temperature. Only regular monitoring and testing can solve these problems. A strong local grid:Hospitals can make themselves resilient by adopting demand response initiatives that help to strengthen the resiliency of the local grid. During a crisis, protecting the backup power should be the main target of a hospital. Equally important are the management programs made for emergency demands. A final takeaway:We can never prevent power failure due to natural calamities. But we can take all the necessary initiatives to get proper ups power supplies prepared to deal with such difficulties. The hospitals need to consider the points (discussed above) seriously to continue their services even during power failures.
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