During disasters, the ability of critical healthcare facilities to operate in the absence of utility power can be a matter of life or death. For this reason, government officials devote tremendous resources to addressing threats to emergency power at a critical healthcare facility.
In helping to safeguard emergency power, one of the most powerful tools government can have at its disposal is fast and accurate information about the nature of a threat to a facility’s emergency power.
The Powered for Patients NIPP Security & Resilience Challenge presents the opportunity to harness the tremendous power of remotely operated fault detection systems to provide real time alerts to government officials when emergency power is threatened. With this information, government can accelerate response and alert utilities to a threat to emergency power, providing utilities with the opportunity to expedite prioritized power restoration.
The growing number of critical healthcare facilities using today’s powerful fault detection and automated reporting technology can play a vitally important role in ensuring the success of the NIPP Security & Resilience Challenge in the following key ways:
- Engage in discussions with Powered for Patients project leaders about sharing real time information about emergency power system status during disasters. These discussions will cover important topics such as the scope of information sharing, how information will be used and by whom, when this information sharing will be initiated and when it will be concluded. The collective input received around these key questions will help form the basis of an accelerated information sharing protocol that will serve as a national best practice.
- Individual facilities can serve as a pilot site to help in the development and testing of the data synthesizing prototype. This will involve pilot sites sharing the real time data feeds from their remote monitoring and automated reporting fault detection systems with project engineers and scientists.
- In addition to individual discussions with healthcare facility leaders and trade association executives, Powered for Patients will facilitate a stakeholder meeting involving government, healthcare, the utility sector and the technology providers of remotely operated fault detection systems to enable collective discussion of the draft information sharing protocol. A representative group of leaders from healthcare systems and individual facilities will be invited to participate in this stakeholder meeting.
If you’d like your facility to participate in the Powered for Patients NIPP Security & Resilience Challenge, or if you have questions about the project, please contact Project Director Eric Cote at cote@poweredforpatients.org.