HTS - Press Release

September 2009 - Downey, CA – Healthcare Technical Services, LLC (HTS) recently completed the commissioning efforts for Kaiser Permanente's new Downey Medical Center in Downey, California. The facilities officially opened for members on September 15th of 2009. The Downey project consisted of a new central utility plant and 352 bed hospital tower which was designed by HMC Architects with McCarthy as the General Contractor. This project touched all three of the vertical business units of HTS: full Commissioning Services, Transition Planning Services, and FreightTrain® Software as a Service. The Downey Medical Center project was the first project to utilize the FreightTrain suite of software modules to provide construction coordination and management from its inception. Utilizing the Visual Fragnets® developed with the FreightTrain software the Transition Planning Team provided support documents to facilitate the necessary training and certification requirements for the Hospital.

HTS' commissioning efforts focused on the central utility plant and hospital buildings. The hospital has a total of nineteen rooftop air handling units, eighteen of which utilize a heat recovery loop which pre-heats or pre-cools the outside air prior to the chilled water coil in an effort to minimize construction costs. There are eleven operating suites and nineteen negative pressure isolation rooms serving the 352 bed new Hospital Tower. HTS' assessments included: domestic hot water, humidification within the hospital areas, and de-humidification strategies at the main air handling units, kitchen refrigerators and freezers, laboratory refrigerator and freezers, over 800 constant air volume terminal units, fan coil units, blower coil units, clean steam generation and a few low voltage specialty systems such as Nurse Call, and the Digital Antenna System which provide both cell phone and pager coverage throughout the site. Emergency power for the site is provided by six diesel emergency generators with accompanying paralleling switchgear.

One of the greatest challenges of this project was the humidity control in the operating rooms. The mechanical design and equipment performance for moisture removal at the air handling units satisfied the code requirements, but Kaiser Surgeons wanted to push the limits of the system with lower space temperatures which resulted in higher than 60%RH code restrictions. After fine tuning the control system programming and training of the Nursing and Physician Staff, the operating suites now provide stable temperature and relative humidity operation. If any one of the supporting systems does not consistently perform to the design intent, the critical environment of the operating room is compromised. The Operating Staff required sufficient training from HTS in order to understand the complex nature of the sequences of operation laid out in the systems design. Proper training ensures efficiency when faced with problems and helps identify inefficiencies before performance issues affect the controlled environment or operation of the critical imaging equipment.

HTS commissioning team played a key role on this project as Kaiser Permanente's advocate in working with the General Contractor, Sub-Contractors, and Engineers of Record to provide systems that operate efficiently and reliably with ease of use for their Operating Staff. HTS validated the Owner's design objectives by ensuring the systems operate accordingly, while providing accurate training and securing project close-out documentation as complete and properly indexed for ease of use.

For more information on HTS' Commissioning Services, please contact Alexandra Conn aconn@consulthts.com or visit our website www.freighttrain.com