MEDICAL FACILITIES CASE

MEDICAL

The Problem

In 2017 there were 5,564 hospitals in the U.S. and as of 2019, the number has grown to 6,210 or a 10% growth in three years according to the American Hospital Association.

Many of the hospitals since 2017 have undertaken significant expansion and renovation projects as they prepared for an uptick in patient volumes. As hospitals grow, they typically add to the existing facilities infrastructure in some form or another, which can lead to a patchwork of solutions over the prior decades since the hospital originally open. This patchwork can easily stretch back over 40 years of different infrastructures in the solutions for electrical distribution in the buildings.

Just like the changing demographics of the patients, and the new options for health care we have today, options for how the health of the facilities engineering infrastructures like electrical, mechanical, building envelope and others need to be reviewed and reevaluated to ensure that the facility can meet the growing needs of the community.

With regards to the electrical system, there are some unique problems that many hospitals face across the U.S. Some of them are.

• A patchwork of older aging vs newer electrical distribution equipment within the facility
• Not having the necessary schema of where equipment is feed from and what it feeds or where it can be found quickly in an emergency.
• Inability to correctly determine the Critically to Operation (CTO) of the electrical equipment (what is critical, essential and non-essential equipment) because of a lack of quality data at hand for review.
• Oversimplification of the requirements for preventative /predictive/condition monitoring testing is required to do a professional job.
• Turnover in engineering staff where the tribal knowledge has not been able to be passed on to the next person, leading to attrition in the general knowledge of the facility and a much longer learning curve for new employees.

The Solution

For over 40 years Colbert Infrared has been working in the health care market providing advanced electrical/mechanical infrared imaging utilizing the best equipment and inspection procedures by highly trained and experienced professional certified infrared thermographers, combined within the field data collection, analysis and reconciliation utilizing a mobile database solution called Thermal Trend – Lean DB.

• Thermal Trend – Lean DB allows us to quickly and easily inventory all the equipment, associate it with a barcode for easy identification, and log all problems found in the equipment for trending of the problem condition overall inspections.
• This world-class solution allows for us to build out a complete picture of entire electrical system for understanding the schema and the interdependences of each piece of equipment and allowing for correct classification of the “CTO” as it relates to the reliability of the equipment to the operation of the hospital.
• Furthermore since all of the equipment history, just like a “Patients Medical Record” is immediately available to the thermographer while they are in front of the equipment, they can evaluate and analyze the problems with all of the data presented when and where they need it.

Colbert Infrared – World Class Innovations that never stops!

When you have the complete picture, you can gain a perspective that you could not have achieved any other way. The advanced reporting that is generated by the Thermal Trend – Lean DB provides our clients with all the critical information that they need to make informed decisions with. But we don’t stop there. Since all of the data is stored in a “Real” database, we and further the analysis by using advanced Business Intelligence software that provides our clients with direct access to their data in a user friendly, graphical interactive web-based solution “Thermal Trend – Insight” that allows them to explore even deeper to better understand what is going on in their facilities.

Please give us a call or email us so that we can help to informer you better about the innovative solutions that we can provide to your facility.