How can one of the nation’s leading healthcare providers leverage Vaisala humidity and temperature meters to meet stringent certification standards for safe operating room and laboratory environments

A major U.S. health care system is harnessing the power of measurement technology to help enhance the overall patient experience and provide compassionate care. A key initiative to deliver on this promise is to enhance the quality of care and ensure patients through more effective outcome-based certification programs

Challenges: Calibrating transmitters in critical Spaces to ensure compliance is difficult

As the healthcare industry, and beyond, continues to adopt digital technologies, these innovations are increasingly being deployed in new ways to help improve care outcomes. The building Energy Efficiency and Control group of a US healthcare provider began its digital transformation in 2015, a process that continues today, with the team responsible for managing approximately 12 million square feet of building space across eight hospitals in the region.

The problem the team faced was twofold: On the one hand, the data it received was inconsistent because the measuring instruments were different. The team currently uses equipment from a number of sensor vendors, including Vaisala, and has encountered difficulties with measurement consistency, equipment standardization, and large-scale humidity drift. Second, the third-party service the team used to calibrate humidity and temperature transmitters in critical Spaces – namely, anesthesia rooms, radiology and operating rooms, laboratories and pharmacies – had difficulty calibrating the equipment.

Calibration is important to ensure that the healthcare system meets the requirements to obtain and maintain hospital accreditation that verifies Medicare compliance. The DNV GL NIAHO certification program combines CMS participation requirements with an ISO 9001 quality management program to directly address the requirements of a Content management system (CMS).

All U.S. hospitals that accept Medicare and/or Medicaid are required to comply with federal health and safety standards, but providing good patient care can be difficult when providers are already overburdened by accreditation and accreditation processes. Complicating matters further is the fact that our customers continue to face issues related to compliance due to the wide variety of sensors installed and a lack of confidence in the accuracy of their measurements. As a result, its building energy efficiency and control teams were forced to make repeated service calls and required multiple trips to the site to adjust humidity issues, learn how to repair various sensors and replace those that could not be calibrated.

Solution: A digital system for capturing, recording and reporting data to meet certification standards

Because our client’s team audits data points for critical Spaces on an annual basis, their humidity and temperature meters must be tested and calibrated on an ongoing basis. To overcome customers’ problems with critical space testing and meter calibration, as well as measurement consistency, equipment standardization and large-scale humidity drift, the team adopted Vaisala’s humidity and temperature transmitter series HMW90 and handheld humidity and thermometer HM70 as standardized products in 2017. In 2019, the instrument will be self-calibrated.

Pull annual calibration to ensure reliable and accurate measurements. Such protocols are an economical and convenient way to maintain the accuracy of Vaisala meters over their lifetime, with several advantages:

• Reduce multi-year calibration costs.

• Flexibility to add calibration services in accordance with agreed terms during the term of the agreement.

• Enjoy high priority service, shorten delivery time and convenient return process.

• Access to Vaisala’s MyLearning platform, online training and regular Q&A sessions with experts.

The Vaisala long-term Calibration plan can be tailored to your unique needs and is available for all Vaisala instruments that offer calibration services.

In order to evaluate Vaisala solutions, our customer installed a data log and provided a monthly director’s report focusing on the relative humidity and temperature of the compliant indoor environment, meeting the high accuracy, stability and reliable operation required for demanding humidity measurements in spot check applications, it is ideal for on-site inspection and calibration of Vaisala fixed humidity meters. With HMW90 and HM70, our customers have added key space design standard specifications to all reliable data logs.

Ensuring that critical healthcare Spaces meet specific standards for humidity, temperature and other important parameters is critical to enhancing patient safety, quality of care and delivery of healthcare services. Whether for the efficient operation of equipment, the safety and comfort of patients and staff, the prevention of microbial growth, the safe storage of vaccines/drugs, or to meet different anesthesia standards and guidelines, it is important to measure the relative humidity and temperature of critical Spaces where complex surgeries are performed and the environmental conditions surrounding patients and staff are critical.

“We can plug in a wall-mounted device and use a hand-held meter to calibrate it in real time, which ensures that our work meets the requirements,” says an expert on our customer team. “We don’t see a big drop in humidity, and the failure rate of these devices is very low… It’s a very reliable sensor in a way that other out-of-the-box solutions don’t.”

The company’s digital quality management system integrates sensors that meet specifications, deliver high performance over time, are accurate and reliable from installation to scheduled maintenance, calculate high and low values over a period of time, automatically create work orders when high/low alarms occur, and enable building energy efficiency and control teams to understand and resolve issues to meet certification requirements and maintain hospital certification levels.

Benefits: Consistent, accurate and reliable measurement data that meets certification standards and ensures the safety of operating room, laboratory and pharmacy environments

Vaisala draws on 85 years of experience in humidity sensor technology to create products that deliver reliable measurement data, which is essential to meet certification standards and ensure a safe operating environment in critical Spaces. The main advantages of using Vaisala humidity and temperature meters to meet DNV GL’s stringent hospital certification standards are the sensor’s accuracy and reliability, as well as enhanced energy savings when used with temperature reset.

“The vendor used Vaisala as the standard because of its higher accuracy and reliability compared to other out-of-the-box solutions,” said the team’s director of control systems and energy Management. “When we receive the new sensor, Vaisala has calibrated it and provided certification documentation, which we can use every year to stay compliant. With more accurate record-keeping capabilities, we can ensure that the compliance data we submit is correct because there is no doubt that the sensors are working properly.”

By implementing Vaisala measurement solutions, our customers not only receive reliable compliance data, but are also able to use these meters to regulate the temperature of their air handling units, achieving significant energy savings. In fact, one hospital the group focused on energy management in the region is now an Energy Star-certified hospital in the state. In the United States, buildings must meet stringent energy use standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to qualify for Energy Star certification. But the added benefits of this implementation include cost savings, on the one hand because the system is electronic, so there is less human effort to manually check the humidity, and on the other hand, because the calibration has been done in-house since 2019, so there is less third-party supplier costs.

As our customers and other forward-thinking organizations in healthcare continue their digital transformation, and as healthcare systems continue to expand their digital footprint and install sensors in non-compliant critical Spaces, Vaisala Instrumentation will continue to play a vital role. With consistent, accurate, and reliable measurements, organizations in the healthcare industry can continually improve the health, development, and well-being of the communities they serve by consistently adhering to high standards to deliver good healthcare.