Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Power outages can be disruptive and frightening, and especially so when they happen at a hospital. That was exactly the case last week when the lights went out at Gateway (News - Alert) Medical Center in Clarksville, TN.

According to local newspaper The Leaf-Chronicle, staff and patients at the hospital were left in the dark silence for about 30 minutes when the power went out and backup generators failed to fire up. Thankfully, staff continued with patient care and critical emergency equipment had battery backup and was able to function, despite the disruption. The hospital is continuing to investigate why the backup generators failed to start up.

Beyond the basic disruption in normal processes and routines, the outage raises the question of what happened to valuable patient and hospital data that may have been in limbo when systems went down. In fact, according to a recent Health Facilities Management article, one in 20 U.S. hospitals are not fully prepared for an outage. That’s a pretty significant number, and one that doesn’t take into account how much damage data loss could cause – both for the hospital and patients.

The importance of power protection in the case of an emergency outage can’t be underestimated. And while battery backups can work for smaller pieces of emergency equipment, items like uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) are absolutely essential for backing up data and helping ensure infrastructure runs smoothly.

Companies like Minuteman Power Technologies, part of the larger Para Systems (News - Alert), specialize in power protection solutions like UPS systems, which ensure workstations, phone systems and even security solutions remain running with no data loss in the event of a power outage. The company also offers surge suppressors to ensure equipment isn’t damaged by power surges and spikes along with remote power management solutions for administering the power of connected devices remotely. All of these items could prove invaluable in the event of a situation like the one at Gateway Medical Center.

Minuteman also offers the EnTerra 3-Phase UPS System, providing a variety of efficiencies and cost savings for medical equipment applications along with industrial equipment and data centers. The solution features a Redundant Parallel Architecture technology that enables users to parallel multiple units, leading to increased flexibility, reliability and redundancy.