Why Do I Need Backup Power?

It’s one of our most asked questions, and it has many answers.

• Backup generators help protect priceless biomedical inventory

• Backup power is needed to receive accreditation from the most powerful institutions

• And a backup power plan helps to ensure the health and safety every patient

However, one of the most important benefits your facility receives when choosing reliable backup power are the immense cost savings provided when contrasted with the heavy losses that can be sustained in an emergency power outage situation.

Thus, in order to continue providing excellent care for the community in the long-term, effective risk-management and loss prevention are essential to maintaining the optimal health of the facility both financially. With backup power your facility gains the ability to continually operate in a safe manner— both by being able to bring any patient’s being operated on to a stable state and to ensure any medicines, vaccines and other pharmaceuticals do not experience any temperature excursions and remain safe to use in the future and do not lose their efficacy.

How Backup Power Saves Medical Facilities Money

The simplest and easiest way to illustrate the value provided by battery backup power is a tried-and-true cost/benefit analysis. For facilities like:

• Pharmacies
• University health and research centers
• Government-funded migrant health clinics
• General practitioner's offices
• Department of Veterans Affairs Hospitals

A battery backup system provides instant power to the appliances storing high value inventory like:

• Vaccines
• Cancer drugs
• Lab samples
• Research specimens
• And other expensive pharmaceuticals

According to the CDC —as of March 2022—single dose of a common vaccine such as HPV-9 (trade name Gardasil®), costs over $250 per dose—$253.60 to be exact. A small 5 ft3 medical-grade vaccine refrigerator can be estimated to hold approximately 100-400 doses at a time. Therefore, the potential loss exposure in case of an outage where backup power either fails or does not exist could result in anywhere from $25,000 to over $100,000 worth of damage—far more expensive than the backup system needed to power that appliance.

However, experiencing a worst-case scenario or total loss is not necessary to recoup the value of a battery backup system. Because they continue to keep your appliances running as normal, valuable time and resources won’t need to be diverted away from patients and their families so while administrators purchase temporary coolers and ice, nurses log inventory and move vaccines into coolers, put everything back later, and facilities managers test appliances to make sure they’re fully operational when the power does return—a timeframe that can never be certain.

The opportunity cost of this manpower presents an opportunity to improve patient experience by maintaining order at the most crucial times—taking critical responsibilities off the plate of the team members who can now be deployed more efficiently throughout the facility.

Does Backup Power Make Sense for Surgery Centers?