<Basically, there are four types of equipment used in Hospitals: 1) Monitoring Devices, 2) Life support equipment, 3) Diagnostic equipment and 4) information systems.>
How could you leave out #5?
Facilities Management--- A hospital can be viewed as it's own self contained city!
For instance if the power company fails, the hospital has their own emergency power, however that will only provide minimal support of the hospital.
There is every type of embedded control used in Facilities management from water treatment, phone systems, CMMS software, fire protection equipment, security monitoring devices, Embedded controllers in Chilled water sytstems, Boilers, domestic water pumps and boost pumps all operated by embedded controllers that keep their own performance history, AND is tied back into the CMMS software. A hospital I am working at now has every room and area temp controlled by CMMS software. No thermostats anywhere! Can you imagine manually throtteling valves to each room and area to maintain comfort, as the sun rises and temps heat up and at night readjusting for cooler temps? And even this scenario is dependent on if the heating and A/C
can be put online and manually balanced for the changing load. Not impossible, but how do you instantly hire an extra staff of plant operators that know your systems to handle all this manual work?
How could you even handle the phone calls for the request?(assuming the phone system survived the hit) |
