A prominent San Francisco Bay Area children’s hospital network has several clinics in California and all of them face the same issue: maintain cleaner air and healthier environments for patients and workers every day, particularly when wildfires occur.
“Air quality can get extremely bad during wildfires, particularly in our older buildings” – said Nichole, Environmental H&S Program Manager. “In order to monitor air quality inside our facilities we were actually driving from one location to the other with heavy devices to gather data… it was incredibly time-consuming and we needed a remote monitoring solution.”
On top of that, the hospital was looking for an easier way to do sampling of Air Quality Index (AQI) measurements in order to comply with California OSHA regulation aimed at protecting workers from wildfire smoke (more details here).
The main goals of the whole healthcare air monitoring project can be summarized as follows:
a) remotely monitor IAQ in all the buildings
b) set up tracking for regulatory requirements
c) share data for internal transparency
In 2020 the hospital decided it was time to find a provider of air monitoring solutions that could satisfy their needs; that is, make life easier for the hospital staff to know the indoor air quality and the impact of wildfire smoke, while complying with local regulation.
TSI solutions for indoor and outdoor monitoring met the customer needs and thanks to TSI’s reputation, the decision was clear. The children’s hospital implemented his first IAQ program with 25 BlueSky™ Air Quality monitors.
TSI BlueSky™ Air Quality Monitor is a lightweight particle instrument designed to simultaneously measure PM2.5 and PM10 mass concentrations, temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, O3, CO, CO2, NO2, and SO2.
TSI Link™ Solutions is the cloud-based platform that allows you to manage your devices and view air quality data from anywhere at any time, while also providing multiple integration opportunities through API.
Strategically positioned in high-risk locations, BlueSky™ devices in combination with TSI Link™ Solutions allowed the children’s hospital to:
- Remotely monitor indoor air quality in all their clinic facilities
- Save time, department’s expenses and simplify the process
- Track air quality conditions (AQI 2.5) in real-time and take quick actions
- Be compliant with local wildfire regulation
- Share results internally
According to the H&S Program Manager: “The device installation was simple and TSI Link™ Software dashboard was very helpful and user-friendly. It was also very easy to get the meters installed. “Indeed, – concludes Nichole – I didn’t have to go through any training. It was very easy.”
When asked about the most useful feature of TSI Link™, she had no doubts: alert notifications are top of the list.
The department usually set a threshold of 120 AQI to be able to mitigate any wildfire smoke issues before reaching the critical level of +150 AQI and the process works smoothly: when the level goes beyond the threshold, the team gets an email notification and managers also receive a text message on their phone. Engineers and maintenance team are then informed so they can go to the right location to investigate and mitigate the issue so that air quality can return to more healthy levels.
Source: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/doshreg/Protection-from-Wildfire-Smoke/Wildfire-smoke-emergency-standard.html
Thanks to the combination of TSI monitoring devices together with TSI Link™ cloud-based software, Nichole and the children’s hospital H&S team can now remotely manage air monitors, understand in real-time what is happening to air quality in all clinics and take quick actions to help protect people - particularly during wildfire events.