“The backward compatibility is where it really saves the customer money,” says Kaczmarek. “They may only have ‘X’ number of capital dollars to spend in 2012, so we can provide them with incremental upgrades so they don’t have to spend more.”
Rinehart says the key is partnering with a strong, experienced system provider, like FireTron.
“FireTron is good at keeping us abreast of changing technologies,” he says. “They don’t wait for us to ask for it — they bring it to us, keeping us right at the forefront.”
Paging ‘Doctor Pyro’
The hospital has a standard operating procedure for fire alarms — a “Dr. Pyro” team addresses the issue, says Lonnie Rinehart, Texas Children’s Hospital’s plant operations manager. The public isn’t alerted and the system sends out automatic preset E-mails, texts and pages with critical information in the case of an emergency. Predetermined teams of security, engineering and a nursing administrator respond to the alarm. Security and engineering handle the event until firefighters arrive, and the nursing administrator commandeers anyone needed to handle patient safety.
“It’s difficult to move a two-pound neonatal patient,” says Rinehart. “We evacuate horizontally, across a patient floor, moving everyone from one end of the floor to the other and then we defend in-place.”
The system also boasts a voice evacuation system that can be targeted to certain areas with recorded emergency messages. In addition, there’s the flexibility to give manual voice instructions via a microphone, says FireTron’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing Bob Kaczmarek.
Campus at a Glance
Scheduled to start delivering babies this spring, the Texas Children’s Pavillion for Women is comprised of state-of-the-art towers that are designed to care for the highest risk mothers and infants. The new facility is located in Houston and has two towers: one that is 15 floors and the other that is six floors high. The building is an entire city block wide and two football fields long, and is part of the Texas Medical Center’s five-building campus.
All of its fire alarm technologies are from NOTIFIER, including two NFS-3030 fire alarm control panels, 538 smoke detectors, 248 duct-mounted detectors, 1,427 speaker/strobes and 111 fire fighter telephone jacks.
Matt Wickenheiser is a business journalist living in Portland, Maine. He has reported internationally on trade and disaster response. He can be reached at [email protected].
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