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In my last post, I described six steps to help any healthcare facility improve resilience. In this post, I’ll share a customer story that illustrates how these steps are implemented with impressive results.
The new digital hospital infrastructure
The critical nature of healthcare means that services must be available 24/7 to support the communities that depend on them – even during severe weather or a pandemic. Continuous services and patient safety ensures a reliable, resilient facility infrastructure.
New IoT-enabled power and building management systems help make hospitals more robust against risks that could incur disruptive and expensive outages. By providing complete visibility and control over an entire infrastructure, these digitalized solutions also help facility teams ensure a high-quality supply that keeps sensitive medical equipment operating without failures.
The best power and building management systems are cybersecure by design and supported by end-to-end cybersecurity services. They are based on pre-validated reference architectures and open, flexible digital platforms that can easily scale and adapt to new technologies and standards.
These platforms offer advanced analytics to convert big data into actionable insights to help your team take a proactive approach to power availability while enabling condition-based maintenance, keeping assets running reliably while servicing them only when needed.
But what if you don’t have the resources or in-house expertise to take full advantage of these tools?
The important role of remote services
One of the most powerful features of these new platforms is secure cloud connectivity, which opens a portal to remote services. With the support of offsite experts, 80% to 90% of issues can be identified and resolved before the facility team even knows the issues exist.
The value of these remote services goes well beyond simply reacting to alerts. With a continuous connection to your facility, experts can help uncover risks early, perform root cause analysis, and prevent a problem before a disruption occurs. Having this kind of remote support may mean you don’t need as many on-site personnel at all times of the day or night.
Customer Story: Saudi Arabian hospital maximizes reliability with remote monitoring
Remote services are helping a hospital in Saudi Arabia boost resilience and minimize risks. In this example, the health system includes a 300-bed hospital, as well as many other facilities, including an on-site data center to support critical emergency and administrative services.
With medical procedures and data to protect, downtime is not an option. In this case, the challenge was to achieve 24/7 uptime while minimizing costs.
EcoStruxure Asset Advisor services from Schneider Electric were chosen to oversee the secure power and cooling infrastructure. This cybersecure solution enables remote monitoring and troubleshooting for 25 critical assets, including UPS, in-row cooling units, and PDUs.
Remote services are enabled through a Connected Service Hub, where experienced engineers use advanced analytics, including machine learning algorithms, to quickly identify any critical issues at the site.
For example, a remote expert may alert the hospital about the estimated remaining lifetime of UPS batteries so that a plan can be made for replacement. And beyond equipment health, network connectivity and security issues can also be flagged and resolved.
The hospital facility team now has the peace of mind that they will receive a call from the service hub within 5 to 10 minutes. Along with direct consultation, facility personnel gain mobile access to data and reports to enable decision-making.
The addition of remote services enabled the onsite data center to streamline work shifts, resulting in an annual savings of $120K and 30X ROI with services costs recovered in the first year.
Learn more
EcoStruxure Asset Advisor is part of our future-ready, integrated, interoperable EcoStruxure for Healthcare platform. Its IoT-enabled, cybersecure, and standards-compliant infrastructure includes power and building management dashboards and analytics, a complete range of remote digital and advisory services, plus on-site field services. To learn more, download our eGuide ‘How IoT solutions deliver exceptional resilience for extraordinary healthcare.’
