Adding Value Through HCAi Expertise: Innovative Solutions in Healthcare Technology Design and Seismic Certification

At TEECOM, we live and breathe our core values of demonstrating care, earning trust, and adding value. We seek to exhibit these values within our organization and in every interaction with our clients and partners. By consistently demonstrating these values, we position ourselves as true partners and trusted consultants. Often this means going the extra mile to ensure our clients have the best possible solution to their healthcare technology design challenges. California hospital IT infrastructure provides unique challenges, and having a technology consultant with in-depth HCAi expertise can make a huge impact on delivery schedules and budgets.

One challenge our healthcare team faced in California was specifying telecom room equipment racks for major hospitals. While one might assume this was a relatively straightforward design task, it required coordination across multiple disciplines and had millions of dollars of consideration for the construction budget. These telecom racks were significant to our clients because, according to the California Building Code (CBC), all equipment deemed essential to the operation of a hospital is required to be shake-tested to ensure the equipment continues to operate after a significant seismic event. For technology systems,  this equipment includes network switches, routers, servers, and uninterruptible Power supplies (UPS).  

HCAi, formally known as OSHPD, has a voluntary program called the Special Seismic Certification Preapproval (OSP).  Manufacturers can gain pre-approval from HCAi through the OSP program, so products requiring shake testing can be used on any California hospital project. Many owners choose to go with OSP-approved hardware; otherwise, they would have to go through the costly process of getting other products shake-tested for every project and submitting test results to HCAi for approval. In the long run, the OSP process is the best way for manufacturers to specify their products for California projects.

This all sounds like a straightforward process. Engineers specify the equipment rack that the hospital IT staff has standardized on and reference the HCAi OSP number of the electronic equipment manufacturer. Unfortunately, it is not that easy. HCAi looks at the OSP as a whole system that includes the electronic equipment and the equipment rack in which the electronic equipment was shake tested.

Making matters more challenging, some major network switch manufacturers tested their switches in equipment racks that are no longer available to purchase or custom equipment racks that are not easily obtained. Even though our clients were using the switches approved in these tests, they could not obtain the racks. If our clients used the existing equipment racks they had standardized on, their designs would be rejected by HCAi during the review process because they were not the same equipment rack that the network equipment was tested in the OSP shake test. We needed to devise a solution to support this widespread issue for our projects across California.

To solve this issue, TEECOM worked closely with HCAi, equipment rack manufacturers, and structural engineers to develop a method for substituting equipment racks on projects for racks that owners can use and are readily available. This process took over two years to develop and finalize, and TEECOM is currently using it on all of our HCAi 1 and 4 projects.

Our team truly embodied our core values by demonstrating care for our client’s challenges, earning their trust by working with manufacturers on their behalf, and adding value by collaboratively bringing new products to the market that better suited their needs.

If you would like to learn more about this process, please contact one of our healthcare subject matter experts!