New Tool Offers Hospitals Improved Energy Efficiency

The new Energy to Care Dashboard Tool from ASHE offers an at-a-glance view of healthcare facilities’ energy use.

The American Society for Health Care Engineering (ASHE) of the American Hospital Association has launched a new Energy to Care Dashboard Tool that offers an at-a-glance view of healthcare facilities’ energy use.

Energy to Carehealthcare facilities is an energy reduction program for healthcare facility management professionals who want to add value to their organizations through energy savings. The program’s Energy to Care Dashboard has been designed to be highly visual to reduce user burden as much as possible: The dashboard, monitoring, and energy observation are as simple to use as a fitness tracker that monitor steps.

A successful energy management program optimizes energy performance through benchmarking, establishing reasonable goals, developing action plans, tracking program results and communicating those results with senior management. Using the new tool will only take 15 minutes a day to search for energy savings that can influence about half of a healthcare facility’s total budget, and add value to the organization through savings.

“With utility bills making up almost half of a facility manager’s operating budget, the impact of these energy costs on an individual hospital is huge,” said ASHE Interim Executive Director Dale Woodin. “The new Energy to Care Dashboard is a tremendous improvement over our previous tool that will help our members easily comb through data to find energy savings for their facilities.”

The new dashboard includes a number of features that will provide added benefits to Energy to Care participants, including:

  • Clean, highly-visual and simple to use interface
    • Customized information for AHA/ASHE members
    • Energy to Care Award progress for each site
  • Energy to Care Chapter Challenge reporting
  • ENERGY STAR® Data Options
    • Ability to import existing ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager data
    • ENERGY STAR® logins are no longer required
    • Energy and facility data can be directly uploaded with Microsoft Excel templates
    • Data can be exported to ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager
    • New ENERGY STAR® score widget for convenient monitoring and updates
  • Energy and Cost Data Widgets
    • Monthly utility bill consumption and cost database
    • Energy Cost Index (ECI) monitoring
    • Energy cost savings
    • Energy Usage Index (EUI) monitoring
    • Annual and monthly energy performance measurement and verification
    • Weather data (HDD/CDD) overlays
  • Utility bill fault detection:
    • Gaps in data due to potentially missing utility bills
    • Duplicative utility bills
    • Significant increases in monthly energy consumption and cost

The dashboard account can be accessed through the Energy to Care website.