The Medical College of Virginia

Improving Fire Safety and Creating a More Efficient and Informed Campus

Description

Located in downtown Richmond, Virginia, the Medical College of Virginia is well regarded as one of the leaders in medical research, education and healthcare throughout the nation. MCV is home to the nation’s second oldest transplant program and is also recognized for being one of the top 20 trauma units in the nation. MCV is the eighth largest medical center located on an academic campus in the country.

Scattered throughout the downtown metropolitan area, the MCV campus consists of many buildings of various ages, design and levels. A few of these buildings date from the late 1800s.

Opportunity

Monitoring and responding to fire alarms on a campus of its size is a task that MCV takes very seriously. The campus uses Notifier fire systems by Honeywell and Communications Specialists (CSI) of Hanover, Virginia, for the monitoring coordination. Additionally, the multiple Notifier systems are linked by a Honeywell product called Uninet that consolidates all of the information from multiple fire systems into a common information stream.

The campus maintenance staff uses on-campus alphanumeric pagers that dispatchers and other staff use to communicate information with one another. Real-time events were being processed from the Uninet system and then being manually sent by a dispatcher to the correct personnel. This method was tedious, time consuming and lacked efficiency. Using this approach, there was little accountability and no way of managing the process. Dispatchers therefore could become overwhelmed, adding more time to the process.

Solution

CSI recognized the problem and contacted one of its business partners - Status Solutions, developer of SARA, the Situational Awareness and Response Assistant. SARA is a software solution that monitors many different systems and devices, processes automated alerts, and maintains records. Working in conjunction with CSI, Status Solutions developed a software interface for SARA to accept the data stream from the Uninet system. At that point, the SARA system generates automated alerts to campus personnel using a variety of methods. SARA can distinguish between different alerts and send the information to key staff. SARA can also tree the alerts to different response teams and personnel. The result is a more efficient and informed campus.

This is just one of the applications in which MCV can use the SARA system. SARA is capable of monitoring many other systems and devices typically found in hospitals.