Ensuring Reliable and Sustainable Medical Gas Systems for Patient Safety

Medical gas systems are an important infrastructure in healthcare facilities, providing instant, continuous access to life-saving gases. Reliability is a key aspect of their function, as any failure in gas delivery can seriously impact patient safety. Sustainability is also growing in importance within healthcare facilities and must become a key priority in medical gas systems to reduce both the environmental impact of the system and operational costs.

This article explores how healthcare providers can ensure both reliability and sustainability in medical gas systems.

Medical gas systems provide critical access to many forms of life-saving clinical interventions across ICUs, operating theatres, and emergency departments, including oxygen therapy, delivery of anesthesia, and life support. Any disruption or pressure deviations in these systems, even a momentary glitch, can have devastating effects. These can range from delaying essential treatments to compromising patient outcomes, all of which create serious safety risks for patients. Reliable medical gas systems must therefore ensure that the supply of gas possesses these key features:

• Continuous supply: appropriate infrastructure to prevent any interruptions to the system.
• System redundancy: back-up systems that can immediately take over in cases of primary system failure.
• Monitoring: Alarm and warning systems that immediately alert staff to any issues or failures within the system. 

Rising energy costs, geopolitical disruption, and supply chain pressures are contributing to medical gas prices rising. Healthcare facilities are also facing pressure from both internal and external sources to reduce their environmental impact. This is putting increasing pressure on healthcare facilities, leading many to pursue more sustainable medical gas systems as a way to reduce energy consumption, minimize gas waste, lower their emissions, and improve the efficiency of the system as a whole to achieve sustainability goals. 

Medical gas systems are energy intensive, as many parts of the system – including compressors and vacuum pumps – require continuous running. In addition, many anesthetic gases are potent greenhouse gases, contributing significantly to global warming potential and depleting the ozone layer. Consequently, improving the efficiency of medical gas systems and reducing gas emissions will help to lower environmental impact and enhance sustainability.

Reliability ensures uninterrupted care while sustainability ensures long-term efficiency and reduced environmental impact. These two properties are in conflict, as reliability requires redundancies such as continuous operation, multiple back-up sources, and consistent pipeline pressure, whereas sustainability favors the opposite – reduced consumption, minimized waste, and lean infrastructure. A balance between the two is essential, whereby efficient systems reduce energy use without compromising performance. 

Balancing reliability and sustainability in medical gas systems can be simplified by incorporating the following solutions:

Designing medical gas systems with efficient layouts results in reduced energy demand and ensuring that the system is the correct size for the usage of the healthcare facility avoids overuse and waste. Doing this from the outset, as opposed to retrofitting, is much simpler and significantly more cost-effective.

Monitoring and alarm systems can track pressure, flow, and usage throughout the entire pipeline in real-time, alerting staff when any deviations or faults occur. These systems minimize the risk of severe failures and interrupted supply, instead immediately alerting staff to any issues, enabling essential maintenance to be carried out, and ensuring a continuous supply to patients. These systems also improve sustainability. Detecting leaks early reduces the amount of gas waste and prevents increased energy uptake from machines running continuously to compensate for lost gas and pressure. In sophisticated systems, real-time monitoring can also enable dynamically adjusted energy consumption to match output to clinical load.

Anesthetic gases are potent greenhouse gases and contribute significantly to healthcare facilities’ carbon footprints when vented directly into the environment. Incorporating a halogenated drug recovery (HDR) system alongside anesthetic gas scavenging systems enables harmful gases to be intercepted before they are vented outside. The HDR system can recover liquid anesthetic from the waste gas, which can be reprocessed and reused – not only reducing the environmental impact but also improving sustainability.

Improvements in technology are enabling medical gas systems to run more sustainably while retaining their reliability. Incorporating AI-driven smart monitoring systems allows healthcare facilities to continually monitor supply, consumption, and performance. Energy optimization can be achieved through the use of these systems. In addition, they enable predictive maintenance interventions, where potential issues are detected before they cause disruption. This ultimately reduces the risk of system failures and improves the day-to-day system performance.

BeaconMedaes offer customers access to their MyMedGas smart platform, where users can carry out real-time monitoring to track usage and identify performance issues.