4 min. read
Our Expert Insights series brings you real-world perspectives from our Commercial Markets experts on navigating energy upgrade and transition decisions.
In this segment, Andrew Brzezinski, Vice President of Sales, Commercial Markets, details why healthcare organizations should be focused on infrastructure and facility resiliency to deliver better patient care.
Watch the full video or read the transcript below.
Q: What is facility resiliency?
AB: Facility resiliency is really the lifeblood and the ability to operate when things go wrong. How can we have uninterrupted control of our building during a severe weather event or a grid outage?
Q: How do resiliency measures impact patient care?
AB: It’s a life safety issue. You cannot care for your patients the way you need to without focusing on the resiliency of your infrastructure in your buildings.
If you’re a patient, you need to make sure that the room and the facility that you’re in can operate for you to receive the care you need.
Also, for the caregivers. The clinicians in a lot of scenarios, when there is an outage, they’re focused on responding to that instead of focused on the patient.
Q: What’s driving resiliency urgency?
AB: There’s a lot more urgency around this in recent years. What started as really a mission driven project, there’s [now] been such financial gains from it. And we can think about where our healthcare systems are at today, really trying to manage the financial pressures because they operate at such thin margins that they can’t have these emergency projects op up that really drive them to go broke.
In a lot of scenarios, the events that have caused facilities, specifically in healthcare, to focus on resiliency measures can be a number of different things. Whether that be heat waves or severe weather, ice, snow, our built environment is aging. It’s less expensive to update a building than it is to build a new building. And real estate is at a premium. So in a lot of cases, it’s a financial decision. And with aging infrastructure, a lot of times our facilities, departments, and folks are not getting the capital they need to keep up with the modern needs of that building.
Q: Which resiliency upgrades have the fastest payback?
AB: The top three projects for energy efficiency or the quickest payback [include] LED lighting and controls, [which] is the easiest one. Fairly low cost with a substantial energy savings component to it.
Building automation system optimization is one that’s often overlooked, but can have a major impact just by setting your set points to be more efficient and tightening those up can make a really big impact.
And then HVAC retro-commissioning is another thing where people think about their HVAC systems and really upgrading the equipment and the hardware, but retro-commissioning them to have tighter set points and to make sure that we have different things that really hold together like occupancy. If no one’s in the wing of a building, we can pull those set points back to become more efficient. The focus there is really around stabilizing your energy costs.
Right now across the country, we see energy costs rising, you know, double-digit percentages. And if you can really come off the grid, that helps you stabilize your operational spending on utilities.
Q: What is the cost of doing nothing?
AB: The cost of doing nothing in these scenarios is massive. If you’re a healthcare facility, that is not an option. If you can’t insulate yourself from those severe weather events, your patients will suffer. And in healthcare, the most important job you have is your patient care.
Hospitals and healthcare facilities are the anchors of their community and people look up to them and revere them and if you can’t provide the care that you’re supposed to provide, you get a bad reputation, and patient expectation is a very important thing right now.
There is no waiting out rising utility costs. They [healthcare systems] are getting notices every single year from their utility providers that rates are going up and with ultra-thin margins in healthcare today and decreasing reimbursement, they have no option other than to address their operational costs.
The climate risk is real. Whether it’s extreme weather events or grid outages, we all should be thinking about how we become more resilient in our facilities to continue operations without interruption.
SitelogIQ is your one-stop partner for energy efficiency, renewable, and electrification solutions across your hospital or healthcare system. Let’s chat about your energy upgrade or transition goals.