Ensuring "digital health" with power quality and reliability

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Today, technology touches the practice of medicine everywhere. From the simplest record keeping to the most sophisticated diagnostic imaging, technology is modernising how, when and where health care is delivered to patients. Reliable, high-quality electrical power is at the heart of that transformation.

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The modern health care facility uses digital technology for imaging, order transmission, clinical notes and other aspects of the electronic health record. It has integrated supply chain and revenue cycle management.
Your facility, perhaps not digital today, will become an enterprise that uses fully integrated technology for communication, tracking and information flow. Your digital health care facility will be as paperless, filmless—and most importantly reliable—as your power system allows. Eaton’s Power Quality solutions allow health care providers to deliver quality, reliable health care.
Health care facilities simply cannot afford interruptions in the power supply. From triage to treatment and follow-up, modern health care requires a safe, seamless and reliable supply of stable power. That’s what health care providers, patients and their families expect health care facilities to provide every minute of every day. Managing a health care facility’s power system to that high standard of reliability requires thought and planning. Keeping the power flowing in a health care facility means being prepared for the worst—like coping with the trail of injury and destruction left by the high winds and torrential rains of a hurricane.
When the unthinkable happens, communities turn to their health care facilities, which must be ready to respond. Additionally, maintaining reliable power means knowing how to handle the small, everyday threats to a power system. Power quality fluctuations lasting just milliseconds can jeopardise the data on a health care facility’s network, or damage sensitive laboratory and research equipment. Power outages that last just seconds can compromise patient care and wreak havoc on clinical and financial networks as well as modality processes.
With today’s technology demands, increased electrical load elevates power quality risks in health care facilities to new levels. Much is at stake for a patient, as well as for the physician, if medical operations are interrupted due to a voltage fluctuation, sag or power outage. Power abnormalities can result in corrupted and lost data, communication lock up, rebooting and permanent equipment damage. As hospitals become increasingly dependent on medical and information technologies to support everyday operations, the availability of clean and uninterrupted battery power becomes paramount.
Meeting the routine, everyday challenges— and the extraordinary, unexpected ones—requires a comprehensive view of the power system and careful integration of electrical equipment such as Uninterruptible Power Systems, Power Conditioners or Surge Protection devices that reduce risk and improve reliability and resilience.
Uninterruptible Power Systems (UPS) ensure clean, uninterrupted power to keep critical functions running until backup generators take over— whether that takes seconds or hours. If utility power fails, the power continues to flow without loss or surge. Data isn’t lost and patient care isn’t compromised.
Power Conditioning and/or Surge Protection equipment is designed to minimise damage to equipment when there are surges or sags in voltage on an electrical circuit. The protection device detects the anomaly and temporarily diverts surge current away from the equipment it’s protecting, whether it’s highly sensitive equipment in the lab or servers in the data centre. In most cases a combination of Surge Protection and UPS equipment is required to ensure the highest level of resilience for not only the protected equipment and infrastructure, but also the UPS itself. Rely on these solutions to assure safe, high-quality and uninterrupted power for your health care facility.
Like any other enterprise, a health care facility invests in the buildings and equipment it needs to operate from day to day and keeping up with and applying advanced technology means constantly upgrading infrastructure as needs, services and applications change. To be competitive, a health care facility needs to get the most out of capital investments. Health care managers need power systems and equipment that deliver more capacity and last longer, but cost less to purchase, maintain and operate. Executive boards want to minimise capital expenditure and make their capital investments go further.
Eaton’s comprehensive portfolio of highly efficient, scalable UPS solutions empowers health care facilities to make more effective use of their capital by deploying only as much UPS equipment as is needed initially, which also enables them to operate more efficiently (reducing operating expenses), and scale up their capacity when required.
Aside from initially engineering and installing power protection equipment correctly to ensure compliance with standards, safely providing the desired performance, operational costs and continual reliability over the long term can only be achieved when systems are properly maintained.
Service agreements keep equipment functioning safely, reliably and at peak efficiency. Engineers and technicians monitor equipment performance after installation and perform maintenance when needed. Eaton offers performance-based maintenance services that provide the right maintenance at the right time to extend equipment life. That extends equipment life and reduces overall operating cost. Remote monitoring makes it possible to view what’s going on in a power system. As new equipment and technologies are added, they are easily integrated into the remote-monitoring system, allowing managers to see and control the entire system. As a backup resource, Eaton technicians and engineers can monitor system performance remotely.
With Eaton’s power quality solutions, equipment is more reliable, performs better and space is used more efficiently. Performance-based maintenance methods monitor performance and schedule maintenance only when performance slips. That’s more efficient than the traditional practice of doing maintenance at fixed intervals, whether the equipment requires it or not. The result is extended equipment life and lower overall maintenance expense.
Eaton not only provides solutions to protect your equipment from power hazards and outages that can cause million-dollar losses, but also offers Power Distribution equipment, advanced Racks, Rack Power Distribution, Air Flow Management Systems and Integrated Security Solutions to keep your operations safe and secure.
Whether you operate a single hospital or a network of facilities, Eaton can provide the power protection products and services you need. Eaton offers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions that are designed and manufactured to work together to provide consistent, reliable power for your critical equipment.
For more information visit www.eaton.com/powerquality