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Ensuring the power stays on

Healthcare Life Safety Compliance, April 5, 2020

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Healthcare Life Safety Compliance.

by John Palmer

A group of hospitals in the Dallas, Texas, area are piloting a technology program designed to keep the power on during disasters by connecting to a central dashboard that may be able to warn about outages well before they occur.

The program, known as Powered for Patients, was created in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, which struck the U.S. in October 2012. The storm flooded basements in New York and New Jersey, making generators inoperable, and knocked out emergency power to some healthcare facilities, forcing them to turn to evacuation plans they never thought they’d need.

In 2018, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) gave Powered for Patients a grant to help develop a prototype dashboard. It’s being touted as the first-ever near-real-time automated warning system to advise government officials and utilities when emergency power is threatened at a hospital or when a critical healthcare facility is dealing with an extended power outage.

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Healthcare Life Safety Compliance.

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