Sophisticated advances in electronic medical equipment and instrumentation have been a boon to hospitals, walk-in clinics, and even the traditional family doctor. But not without cost! These medical instruments and systems, even while diverse in function and relatively simple to operate are substantially more complex. As the industry crams more and more processing power into less and less space, the devices are susceptible to a wider variety of failure mechanisms. Many of the failures are traced to problems related to power quality.
Power problems emanate from many sources including lightning and utility, but most power problems come from the hospital walls themselves, from elevators, coffee pots, copying machines, centrifuges, air conditioners, generators and other loads internal to the facility. Even small disturbances of a few volts can disrupt a system's delicate brain, causing memory errors or permanent destruction of its processing plant.
Hospital Case Study
Pinpointing problems quickly
Power problems are notoriously hard to capture and pinpoint, leading to frustration, costly downtime and exposure to future re-occurrence.
Outline – power outage to key systems
A lightening storm caused a re-closure on the utility feed to a Hospital causing a momentary outage – affecting several Mission Critical systems, notably their Angio Suite-Cath Lab x-ray systems. The recently installed "Signature System" for monitoring power quality helped pinpoint both the location and the nature of the problem within minutes – ensuring that On Power and staff could rectify it and move on versus the typical endless speculation.
Background – UPS & Monitor performance
A UPS was installed to protect xray systems, and a monitoring system was installed to review the input & output of the UPS, the utility feed and power to the x-rays – 4 points throughout the hospital as a verification / proactive maintenance tool. At the exact moment of the x-ray shutdown, 1) the monitor picked up the utility outage, 2) the 20 seconds it took for the generator to come on-line, 3) the UPS maintaining power throughout this period, and 4) an outage at the x-ray that indicated a mechanical "lock-out". This lead On Power to discover that the "EPO" for the x-ray was fed from "emergency power", not "UPS power".
Summary
Problems of this type are common in many sectors and typically lead to re-occurring results because the location and nature of the "power events" are not captured.