ACADEMIA

Toshiba America Research has entered into an alliance with Weill Cornell Medical College on a new research project that will enable academic medical centers to better manage their use of electrical power for patient care, teaching, and research.

“This will be vital in helping better manage their power usage, ultimately helping to make them both more energy efficient and more resilient.”

The project aims to improve future power-management systems to help healthcare facilities maximize their energy efficiency. It will involve detailed monitoring of current power consumption at several WCMC locations, along with scenario-based simulation modeling to explore strategies for improved surge and emergency power capability.

The project has particular relevance in New York City, where new laws will require hospitals and other health care institutions to have a detailed understanding of their power usage in order to facilitate emergency operations. And with supercomputing for “crunching” large medical and scientific data sets, academic medical centers are facing new power requirements that have not been systematically evaluated.

“We are very pleased and excited to be entering into this alliance with Weill Cornell Medical College, which will provide invaluable information on the current power environment in hospitals,” said Dr. Minoru Yonezawa, Toshiba America Research, Inc. “Once we have completed our research, we will have a far better understanding of the dynamic power and associated utility requirements of modern integrated health care systems, as well as operational strategies to most efficiently meet those needs. This project will lay the foundation for substantially improving how integrated power and resource-management systems utilize existing and novel power sources within healthcare institutions.”

“This project will give healthcare institutions crucial data and simulations that will allow them to develop their own detailed models that accurately capture their ‘power profiles,’” said Dr. Nathaniel Hupert, an associate professor of healthcare policy and research at Weill Cornell and the study’s principal investigator. Dr. Hupert will collaborate with Dr. K. Max Zhang, an associate professor at Cornell University’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. “This will be vital in helping better manage their power usage, ultimately helping to make them both more energy efficient and more resilient.”