UCH_Inpatient Tower Intelligence Flow

Volume 6 | Issue 7 | through October 9, 2012
New tower’s intelligence to flow through many systems, wires
Brawn in Place, It’s Brains Time
By Todd Neff
The new UCH inpatient tower’s skin and bones are done. From the
outside, it already looks quite sharp.
said Harry Pompiean, senior project manager for the tower
expansion project.
But inside, it’s still a dullard. You see, the nerves and brains of
what will be a highly intelligent building well before patients arrive
in spring 2013 are a work in progress. But Information Services-led
teams are hard at work on dozens of systems that will change that.
And while computer hardware and software experts toil away, the
most vivid effort in the hardhat zone involves arraying the cables
through which the building’s intelligence will soon flow.
The finished product: 100-gigabit wiring for data and
telecommunications snakes in neat wires in a first-floor telecom closet
in UCH’s new Critical Care Wing.
With nurse call, for example, “It used to be that you pushed a button
and a light went on,” Pompiean said. “Now you push a button and it
goes to someone’s cell phone and someone’s computer.”
A river of computer wire spills onto the third floor of the new UCH tower.
They’re called low-voltage wires, distinct from those leading to and
from light switches and plugs, and they become more important in
the building business with each passing year, said John Burgess,
project manager for communications at UCH. He and Information
Services colleague Kathy Deanda, RN, share responsibility for
managing the many systems converging to infuse UCH’s latest
addition with smarts.
Low voltage. “Not that long ago, when you said ‘low voltage,’
it was just a few wires, and you were talking about telephones,
plus intercom, overhead paging, nurse call – pretty simple stuff,”
There are dozens of low-voltage systems at work within a hospital.
So many, Pompiean said, that the UCH team brought on a lowvoltage consultant, Andy Parsons of EDI, Ltd., to help them sort
it all out. In addition, there initially were meetings at 6 a.m.
on Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays among the low-voltage
contactors, as well as Haselden and UCH project managers, he
added. They still meet weekly. Why?
“Everything touches everything,” Pompiean, elaborating that
the many low-voltage systems will interact and communicate
with users and other systems to create a safe, comfortable
environment for those inside the tower.
For example, a fire alarm will trigger a signal to the building control
system to shut down an air handler to avoid sucking smoke into
rooms or corridors, Pompiean said. The fire alarm’s cascade will
Continued
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Volume 6 | Issue 7 | through October 9, 2012 | Page 2
also recall elevators, and cut power to door magnets to close fire
doors automatically.
times slower, Burgess said). But networking hardware improves
every year, and hospital cables increasingly fill with more and
Low-voltage wiring is the foundation of it all. Throughout the new
buildings, hundreds of strands run above every hallway. There
are many colors, but blue predominates. Burgess ordered the
blue cabling, the primary conductor of data along the hospital’s
information highway, in November 2011. It arrived in 1,500 whiteand-gray boxes big enough to sit on, each holding a 1,000-foot coil
of CommScope Systimax GigaSpeed X10D data cable.
That’s 248 miles in total, cut and strung into thousands of individual
wires snaking from innocuous data ports under desks and some
450 wireless access points (that’s as many access points as the
rest of the campus combined, Burgess said).
Wires climb through conduits into the ceiling, where a long
hanging tray guides them to telecom closets. Inside, racks of
48-port patch panels will collect their signals and squeeze their
chattering electrical pulses into fiber-optic cables that run through
thicker risers between floors to servers in Building 500 and, from
there, the rest of the world.
Built for speed. The cable is capable of carrying 10 gigabits (10
billion bits) per second – 10 to 100 times faster than the hospital’s
current cabling, which tops out at 1 gigabit per-second. Ten
gigabits per second is about 14,000 faster than a typical cable
modem connection. A factor of 14,000 is hard to grasp, but in
terms of weight, it’s the difference between a loaf of bread and a
bull elephant.
John Burgess, the UCH communications manager
overseeing the wiring work.
Ten gigabits per second is also a lot more bandwidth than UCH
networking hardware can pour through its wires today (it runs 100
Linx Communications technician Joe Moreno strings wire to a telecom closet
in the new UCH tower. There’s one such closet on every floor, plus a second
“special systems closet” for a host of other low-voltage wiring.
more data from sources such as radiology PACS systems, security
cameras and other sources.
“We typically get the latest and greatest” when it comes to the
wires, Burgess said, to future-proof as much as possible.
Before IS and subcontractors started stringing cable on the first
floor of the new tower (they’re working their way up), they entered
wiring-diagram data into general contractor Haselden Inc.’s 3-D
model of the building’s many systems (Insider, April 11, 2012)
to check for potential collisions with vents or other overhead
hardware. This step spotted conflicts, but wasn’t perfect,
Burgess said.
On a recent Monday afternoon, cabling tumbled from the ceiling
near a third-floor telecom closet. Inside, Linx Communications
wiring technicians Khemlichi Larsen and Joe Moreno made sense
of the seeming disarray. Their work had been delayed by the need
to avoid an overhead obstacle the 3-D model hadn’t reflected. The
men didn’t so much string wire as sling it, wrestle it, and bunch it
into cables as thick as a man’s arm. They took care that each strand
ran along the same depth of a bundle – so that later, if something
goes wrong with a wire, IS techs can tell where it is based on
its location in the cross-section, Burgess said. They then tied the
bundles together with black Velcro straps.
Continued
Volume 6 | Issue 7 | through October 9, 2012 | Page 3
Each floor of the new tower and the Critical Care Wing has two
closets. One is a telecom closet holding the blue lines that carry
data and voice. The signals of other systems – the HALO infantprotection system, the real-time location system for equipment
tracking, the electric-metering system, the Cisco internal phone
system – travel along those many blue wires.
Blue isn’t the only color of the wires stringing about the new tower,
and each color has its purpose.
The blue data cables have lots of company that run to a separate
“special systems closet” for the potpourri of other systems
supporting the new tower. There’s a rainbow dangling from colorcoded loops dripping down from cabling trays: black for security;
green for overhead paging; red for the fire-alarm system; yellow for
nurse call; fluorescent green for patient monitoring, and others. All
of it runs to the special systems closets.
A data port under a future nurse’s station in the new tower.
The combination, Pompiean said, will be a building with amazing
control over its own temperature and security, and one with
remarkable communication skills.
“It’s a thinking thing, not a static building,” he said. “You’ve got
systems and systems and systems. It’s really fascinating and
quite humbling.”