Modern Healthcare – August 12, 2019

26 Modern Healthcare | August 12, 2019

As a result, there was no major disruption in

any of Mount Sinai West’s care delivery service

lines.

While power outages are less alarming than

weather-related disasters that often lead to a loss

of power, they still require extensive and ongoing

planning and oversight, something that hospital

and system executives are learning after recent

outages in other places such as Hawaii, New Jer-

sey and suburban Seattle.

The outage near Seattle hit Valley Medical

Center in Renton, Wash., hard enough that fire

crews on June 26 were forced to move patients

stranded on upper floors to the ground floor,

while some were stranded in elevators. Valley

Medical declined to comment.

In New York, though the blackout was handled

w it h relat ive ease by prov iders a nd sta ff at Mou nt

Sinai West on Manhattan’s West Side, the event

still offered lessons for the disaster management

team at the hospital and its parent. One thing

learned through the experience: It’s not just

medications requiring cool temperatures

that are at risk of spoilage.

“We were monitoring the temperature

in the refrigeration, but we were also mon-

itoring the heat and humidity in the areas

that had shelf-stable medications, because

some of those medications have a thresh-

old for heat as well,” Boyce said. “As good

as we can prepare there are always oppor-

tunities for us to get better.”

That kind of strategy is what experts say

is appropriate but getting harder to main-

tain as hospital care delves deeper into

technology and the size of hospitals and

systems grows.

Beth Israel Lahey Health in Boston

takes an all-hazards approach to power

outages, giving a lot of attention to mak-

ing each hospital resilient to emergencies

and toward reducing the impact of power failures. “Fif-

teen years ago, we used to hold our breath and hope that

nothing happened, but hope is not a strategy,” said Meg

Femino, senior director of emergency management at

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

A team led by three project managers runs emergency

planning for the system’s five hos-

pitals. Their approach is to create

redundancies within emergency

power systems by interconnect-

ing the system’s five generators

to ensure a hospital maintains

power even when its primary or

secondary power sources fail. “If I

look back 15 years ago, if an emer-

gency generator went out on one of

our buildings on the east campus

that would cause a complete power failure in that

whole building,” Femino said. “Five generators are

all interconnected so that if one goes out another

one can back-feed these buildings.”

Much of the focus now is on preparing for the

likeliest causes of power disruptions, such as

extreme weather events like blizzards and hur-

ricanes, along with disasters more indicative of

urban areas such as mass transit accidents and

building collapses.

Clinicians step up

Femino said one of the biggest improvements

in readiness has been in the training of clinical

staff. Beth Israel developed a system of pre-plan-

ning for times when the main power is scheduled

to go off for maintenance checks. Nurse man-

agers from all of the system’s critical-care units

will meet with emergency managers weeks in

advance to discuss what devices will work and

won’t work during the disruption to mitigate any

potential problems that might arise during the

power interruption.

In addition to having multiple gen-

erators, many systems located in

urban areas are connected to two elec-

trical power grids, which allows them

to switch seamlessly when their main

power source is suddenly disrupted. In

recent years many providers have added

automatic switching capabilities to their

emergency electrical power sources, so

they can sense problems within seconds

and make a near seamless transition

to backup power without the need for

someone to do it manually.

“The evolution of emergency pre-

paredness for healthcare has brought

us to areas that we (had) never even

thought of,” said Neil DeGregorio, facili-

ties director at Deborah Heart and Lung

Center, an 89-bed ambulatory facility in Brown Mills, N.J.

“I see things changing daily.”

Deborah Heart and Lung experienced a power loss on

the evening of July 18 that lasted nearly five hours. Back-

up power from its three generators allowed the center to

maintain its critical clinical operations, most of its eleva-

tors and the bulk of its air conditioning system. DeGre-

gorio said technological advances in emergency support

systems allow the hospital to keep vital systems running

through a power outage while maintaining patient safety

systems along with some less essential functions that can

affect the quality of a patient’s stay.

He said a lot of emergency planning, besides consider-

ing safety, also takes into account creature comforts for

patients, such as whether the hospital will be able to con-

tinue providing hot meals or maintain television service in

patient rooms.

THE TAKEAWAY

Hospitals say

emergency planning

for a power outage

is an evolving

process requiring

regular testing

and evaluation of

existing systems.

Much of the focus

now is on preparing

for the likeliest

causes of power

disruptions, such

as extreme weather

events like blizzards

and hurricanes, along

with disasters more

indicative of urban

areas such as mass

transit accidents and

building collapses.