St. Catherine Hospital wins Top Project of the Year Award

By: Katelyn Calderwood

Garden City’s St. Catherine Hospital’s BCS Performance Solutions Strategic Energy and Maintenance Program received a Top Project of the Year Award in the Energy Manager Today Product & Project Awards. The project was recognized for excellence in improving environmental and energy management while increasing the bottom line.

One judge said of the award win, “This project allowed the facility to become compliant with regulations, saved money and allowed the facility to operate while meeting critical care conditions for the hospital.  It is impressive that the hospital undertook such a large-scale project to really look at improving the internal environment while also minimizing the effects upon the external environment.  Hospitals are not typically known for implementing green projects.  St. Catherine should be commended for being a leader in making improvements that will help not only their patients, but also our planet.”

Another added, “This was a great application of a building maintenance intelligence system to help with critical infrastructure, like a hospital, improve energy efficiency management without needing to spend significant capital to upgrade the facility’s central power plant. It’s a great model for other older facilities to follow.”

Scores were determined by a panel of independent judges headed by Peter Bussey of LNS Research and also including judges from:  Ball Aerospace, Best Buy, Black Ink Consulting, BSI Group, CandA, Caesars, Consultant Ben Larkey, Harbec, Kellogg, LNS Research, Marriott, Miller Coors,Nike, Novartis, Sears Holdings Corporation, Strategic Sustainable Consulting, Sustridge, Tesla,  Wellborn Cabinet, and Vincit Group.

With rapid advancements and a continuous rate of change in the field, sustainability and energy professionals have the daunting task of choosing products to help their companies increase energy, environmental, and sustainability performance. The Environmental Leader and Energy Manager Today Product & Project Awards give companies a solid base of products, vetted by experts, from which to choose, as well as a variety of successful projects to illustrate how sustainability and energy management is helping companies improve.
“With a highly respected (and critical) judging panel and a strict set of judging criteria, entrants faced an extremely high bar for the level of product or project to qualify for an award,” says Tim Hermes, publisher of Environmental Leader parent company, Business Sector Media. “Those who entered needed to bring their A-game to get even a sniff of award-nirvana. And they delivered.”

About the award-winning project:
St. Catherine Hospital partnered with Performance Solutions to address temperature and humidity compliance issues in critical care areas, decrease energy costs and save time responding to issues. A detailed condition assessment was conducted and identified improvements to ensure the building systems were working efficiently. To solve issues in critical care areas, a central plant and building analysis discovered an underperforming design and recent modification that caused insufficient flow to parts of the hospital. Piping modifications, equipment repairs, and new building technologies optimized chiller plant and surgical suites operations. The improvements resulted in regulatory compliance, capital cost avoidance, chiller plant and critical care optimizations, and confidence in chiller capacity keeping redundancy. To improve hospital data analytics, St. Catherine’s implemented Performance Solution’s Building Intelligence Program (BIP). Maintenance staff monitors, analyzes, and runs reports in real time, enabling staff to make informed facility operations decisions and improve service quality.

Using the facility systems and data already in place, the team conducted a gap analysis and comprehensive facility assessment. Armed with information, St. Catherine and Performance Solutions assessed the root cause of immediate, budget draining, facility issues and fixed them while addressing waste and consumption. A complete inventory and prioritized plan was put in place to improve facility conditions and a best-practices ongoing maintenance plan. The staff trained on efficient operations strategies and in using the Building Intelligence Platform (BIP), a platform that overlays all facility automation systems to track real-time performance data. A financial model was prepared that focused on reducing existing costs. This resulted in a budget neutral program for the hospital after facility improvements were implemented.

Performance Solutions continues to track program results with real-time monitoring and regular report findings for future cost-saving opportunities and to identify facility issues before they arise, creating a more proactive approach to energy management.

In this critical 132 bed hospital, the successful Strategic Energy and Maintenance Program saved the hospital $199,800 in the first year and $1 million in cost-avoidance by avoiding the expansion of their central plant. The hospital’s key challenges of maintaining proper temperature and humidity in critical care areas, reducing energy cost and deferred maintenance, and improving building technologies were fulfilled. They now have the tools to monitor these areas and proactively eradicate problems before they occur while utilizing the BIP to its full potential- tracking trends and utility bill data to identify future projects.

Three years after implementation, the projected savings continue to be on track, exceeding projections. In fact, the hospital submitted for an Energy Star certification. The program’s success is boosting the utilities budget, making it possible to prepare for future facility upgrades and enabling the staff to focus on what matters most, the patient.
Many firms told St. Catherine’s expansion of their central plant to address the regulatory challenges was a necessity. Performance Solutions partnered with hospital staff to take data measurements on real-time system operations. Upon determining the plant should support the load requirement, the teams focused on optimizing the plant rather than trying to sell hospital equipment.

After repairing existing equipment, upgrading the controls system to enable more data and visibility, and setting KPI’s, the system is running effectively. It is running at 1/3 the previous flow and the maintenance team has moved from reactive to a proactive maintenance philosophy. The nurses in critical care areas were provided dashboards that show real-time performance. They can quickly check compliance levels and notify staff of any issue.

These tailored solutions go much farther than traditional performance improvement. The team created a low-cost operations strategy that paid for itself in cost-avoidance and continues to perform well.