Whether you are designing or managing healthcare facilities, safety is a crucial concern. In isolation rooms, operating suites, pandemic preparedness areas, and hospital pharmacies, it’s all about safety.
These rooms require proper airflow to control the spread of airborne pathogens, keeping patients and medical staff safe.
Depending on the application, a particular room may need to maintain either higher or lower room air pressure compared to adjacent rooms or the hallway.
A room with higher pressure maintains positive room pressure, preventing outside air from entering (example, sterile rooms).
Conversely, the room with lower pressure is at negative pressure, preventing air (and airborne pathogens) from leaving the room (for example, isolation rooms).
Sonicu recently launched its SoniShield View room display, which captures real-time and historical data to replace a room pressure system while improving compliance readiness.
While these devices are inexpensive and, at first glance, seem to meet the minimal threshold for compliance, they create operational issues for building managers, safety officers, and administrators seeking empirical data showing actual HVAC performance over time and a record of room pressure compliance across their facilities.
Organizations like The Joint Commission are becoming more rigorous about conducting regular room pressure inspections and strictly enforcing room pressure regulations.
An inspector's walkthrough may show which rooms are in compliance, but because most room pressure devices are simple good/bad indicators, they provide no historical data to record and analyze to determine compliance trends or identify problem areas.
This means there is no data to show an inspector how compliant an organization is, or how problem areas have been identified and resolved.
Facility managers in hospitals struggle to maintain adequate staffing levels, and manual logging of room pressure data requires a person to walk the floor(s) and physically record visual inspections, which still only provides a snapshot of room pressure at that time.
This case study from Indiana University Health shows how they leverage room pressure monitoring to improve efficiency.
This labor-intensive practice is prone to human error and diverts staff from their primary responsibilities.
As regulatory entities drive organizations to improve patient safety, leaders in health care facilities across the country must adapt to keep up.
Wireless room pressure sensing solutions that are accurate, reliable, and automatically log pressure data 24/7 are a valuable tool in the fight against infectious disease.
Room pressure monitoring effectively "future proofs" your facility and removes the burden of recording and logging data from valuable staff members. By staying ahead of regulatory bodies like The Joint Commission, you can save valuable time and money that are better spent improving patient health.
Today, there are a number of automated room pressure monitoring systems for hospitals that provide a higher return on investment (ROI) than manually logging and reporting room pressures.
Unfortunately, most of these systems require retrofitting the hospital building automation system (BAS) to enable data acquisition. BAS integration with these devices can become time-consuming, expensive, and disruptive to implement.
This is problematic if hospitals need to change monitoring protocols quickly due to increased regulatory rigors or to create and monitor new isolation rooms, as we are seeing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to intensify.
Sonicu delivers immediate ROI compared to both manual and legacy systems currently used in hospitals.
To calculate your expected ROI with cloud-based monitoring, contact Sonicu to schedule a convenient appointment with a monitoring specialist.
Every situation is different, but calculating ROI only takes a few minutes, and it's a great opportunity to get your questions about cloud-based monitoring answered.
Because the Sonicu platform is designed for healthcare enterprises, it natively supports a variety of other monitoring applications, including temperature monitoring of freezers, refrigerators, and equipment, -80˚ freezers, cryogenic, ambient room-temperature, and humidity conditions, and much more.
All monitoring applications are seamlessly integrated into the SoniCloud monitoring dashboard for total operational visibility. To see all applications, visit https://www.sonicu.com/
SoniCloud Software Platform Dashboard
Sonicu leverages digital sensors to transmit data via Wi-Fi, 4G/5 G LTE, or Ethernet to the secure, cloud-based software platform SoniCloud, which is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for maximum data security and reliability.
Facility personnel, including Admins, Users, and Managers, benefit from the ability to remotely view real-time pressure conditions for each monitored room via the SoniCloud dashboard, AND pull up historical data to quickly generate compliance reports.
Locally, flush-mounted displays provide actual room pressure for each monitored location, as shown below.
Color-Coded, On-Site Local Display
The SoniCloud platform includes the SMART Tools software suite, in which all data is automatically aggregated and compiled into regulatory-compliant reports designed to meet the requirements of the Joint Commission, HFAB, BoP, and others.
The SMART Alerts alarm handler is a robust tool that can be configured as needed to quickly alert staff by text, phone, or email (or all three) if room pressure falls outside the desired range for a determinable duration.
The flexible monitoring platform also supports BAS integration upon request, and it can be accomplished via an API, without the disruption caused by hardwiring into the BAS system.
Since 2008, cloud-based, wireless monitoring systems have emerged as the de facto standard for a wide variety of monitoring applications.
This is because these systems automate data logging and reporting 24/7, provide stronger data security, offer better operational visibility (with granular detail if required), and deliver higher ROI at the lowest cost of ownership.
Sonicu's wireless room pressure monitoring is a "future-proof" choice for hospitals looking for a cost-effective, easy-to-deploy, highly accurate pressure monitoring system that scales easily as their needs change.
Software and firmware updates are provided as they become available to ensure future compatibility with new features.
To learn more about room pressure and room conditions monitoring, visit:
https://www.sonicu.com/wireless-room-pressure