Solutions for your Business Forum
No matter if your business is in the retail sector, food manufacturing, or healthcare, you'll find resources and a community of experts to discuss with on content tailored to your industry sector. Subscribe today.
Link copied. Please paste this link to share this article on your social media post.
Posted: 2020-05-06 03:13 AM . Last Modified: 2022-06-24 01:04 AM
Adherence to the regulatory requirements of the Joint Commission, the organization that accredits more than 21,000 US healthcare organizations, can impact the reputation and resulting success of most healthcare facilities. Making an effort to maintain or exceed requirements is a sound strategy not only for enhancing the comfort and safety of patients, staff, and visitors, but also for increasing the net worth of an institution and for preparing, in advance, for future regulations that may become more stringent.
With an uptick in mergers, affiliations, and integrations, how well a facility achieves or exceeds compliance can make or break a deal. As part of due diligence, hospitals need to evaluate the regulatory compliance of the practice or provider they are looking to acquire. Otherwise, hospitals may be taking on potential liability.
Regulatory compliance, particularly in the area of safety, can be complex to track and fulfill. Consider the work involved in simply determining whether a large hospital’s fire extinguishers are up-to-date and are not damaged or expired. The facility is required, every month, at a minimum, to inspect and update the conditions of their inventory of fire extinguishers. If each extinguisher has three annual inspection tags (representing the last three years of inspections) and the building has 1,000 extinguishers, then 3,000 tags need to be stored and organized. The work of sifting through these tags and organizing them in order to meet Joint Commission compliance can be overwhelming. A much easier way is to update fire extinguisher status dynamically, using a properly configured building management system, which can then produce an instantaneous report. Such a digital solution is more productive and much easier to manage.
Building automation both simplifies facility compliance and generates energy cost savings
When achieving Joint Commission compliance, fire extinguishers are only the tip of the iceberg. For example, air quality, which encompasses air humidity, temperature, particulate concentrations, ventilation, and air pressure (how fast the air moves through a room) is critical in a connected hospital environment. An unoccupied surgical room is required to process six air changes per hour. Then, just prior to surgery (and during surgery), the air change rate needs to accelerate to 24 air changes per hour. Records surrounding air change data must be meticulously maintained in order to produce reports that meet Joint Commission requirements. In this way, healthcare facilities are protected from possible court litigation.
As a Schneider Electric EcoXpert, our company Wadsworth Solutions supports healthcare institutions as a technology systems integrator. Integration implies the interoperability of multiple systems that don’t necessarily speak the same language. We harmonize these systems using Modbus, BACnet, LonWorks, and OPC protocols to link diverse technologies that help drive timely decisions. We are unique in the marketplace because our integrations impact multiple areas which greatly influence both health care facility compliance and energy savings:
Such improvements to building automation systems are now possible thanks in part to open technology platforms, like Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure solutions, that allow for easy integration of facility technology systems at the intelligent device, edge control and software and analytics layers. Now healthcare institutions, through better integrated technologies, can benefit from much simpler and more accurate ways for attaining Joint Commission accreditation.
-----------------------
Originally posted on SE Blog & authored by Jeff Groat
About the author:
Jeff Groat served in the U.S. Air Force as a Cryogenic Engineer and taught Cryogenic Engineering at the Community College of the Air Force. After that, Jeff worked in the building automation industry supporting Andover Continuum and Schneider Electric (SE) products. He worked as a National Accounts Sales Engineer, then joined Schneider Electric as Midwest Regional Sales Manager. In 2012, Jeff joined Wadsworth Solutions and guided the company towards a holistic building solutions approach—capable of performing 350+ automated projects annually. Jeff was elected to the Schneider Electric Master EcoXpert International Board of Directors in 2019.
Link copied. Please paste this link to share this article on your social media post.
Create your free account or log in to subscribe to the forum - and gain access to more than 10,000+ support articles along with insights from experts and peers.