TIMMINS AND DISTRICT HOSPITAL
Leading by Example

By switching to hourly electricity prices, Timmins and District Hospital has prompted several smaller hospitals to make the change – and reap the rewards.

Under normal circumstances, Dan O’Mara would prefer to be a leader than a follower. When it comes to electricity pricing, however, he’s quite content to follow someone else’s lead.

That someone else is Tim Prokopetz, Manager of Purchasing at Timmins and District Hospital, a 159-bed full-service emergency, teaching and referral hospital serving the City of Timmins and Cochrane District as well as adjoining areas of the Temiskaming, Sudbury and Algoma Districts.

In his capacity as head of procurement, Prokopetz has been a dynamic and vocal supporter of hourly electricity prices since 2006, when he was able to move the hospital’s accounts off the Regulated Price Plan (RPP) and on to the Hourly Ontario Energy Price (HOEP) – a transition to which all Ontario municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals will be subject on May 1, 2009 (provided their consumption is over 250,000 kilowatt hours per year).

Moving pre-emptively to hourly pricing has already paid dividends. Since moving to hourly prices in April of 2006, Timmins and District Hospital has achieved $230,000 in electricity savings, which has been reinvested in projects to enhance patient care and comfort.

Timmins and District Hospital is the largest facility within Network 13 of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care’s North East Local Health Integration Network (LHIN), which is responsible for managing the local health system to ensure that services are integrated and coordinated.

As the “Level C” referral hospital serving the region, it provides specialized medical services like oncology and dialysis; specialized surgical services like orthopedics and gynecology; advanced diagnostics services like computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); and Schedule One psychiatric and critical care services.

Network 13 also includes smaller community-based healthcare facilities in Iroquois Falls, Matheson, Chapleau, Kirkland Lake, Cochrane, Hearst, Kapuskasing and Smooth Rock Falls and Englehart. And it is through this network that Prokopetz met with O’Mara and other hospital administrators to make a pitch on the benefits of hourly electricity pricing early in 2007.

His pitch worked. And by the end of the meeting, six of the nine hospital administrators in attendance had agreed to ask their local utility to move their accounts to the hourly price, which gives them one of the tools they need to better manage their consumption – and their costs.

“When you’re a small hospital, and your resources are limited, it pays to rely on the expertise of others,” O’Mara explains. “Timmins and District Hospital is clearly the leader in this area, and we have considerable confidence in their recommendations.”

O’Mara is the Chief Executive Officer of three hospitals and one retirement home. His portfolio includes the 66-bed Lady Minto Hospital in Cochrane, the 36-bed Bingham Memorial Hospital in Matheson, the 36-bed Anson General Hospital in Iroquois Falls and the 69-bed South Centennial Manor in Iroquois Falls.

As is the case in many rural and northern communities, the relatively small size of local healthcare organizations in the region has led to high fixed operating costs in relation to overall budgets. As a result, members of Network 13 welcomed Prokopetz’s tips on how to reduce their energy costs.

According to O’Mara, the savings resulting from the shift to hourly pricing have been invested in interval meters, another essential in the institutional electricity user’s energy management toolkit. These newly installed interval meters allow his staff to monitor and measure – with considerable precision – how electricity is consumed in each facility in 15-minute chunks.

Switching to hourly electricity pricing has been the most important move made by the Timmins and District Hospital, but it’s certainly not the only one. Over the next few months, Prokopetz plans to implement a number of energy-related initiatives, including a $17,000 power factor correction project, which will pay for itself in less than 18 months. The installation of a capacitor bank and other associated equipment has raised the hospital’s power factor from 83 to 90, which exempts the facility from an annual penalty of $12,000 commonly imposed by local utilities to recover added transmission and distribution costs to compensate for current and voltage irregularities.

Prokopetz considers power factor correction one of the easy wins. “When you’re dealing with hospital executives on energy efficiency projects, it’s important to show progress,” he said. “And while it’s good to be seen to be doing the right thing environmentally, the financial implications of a project are paramount.”
 
The hospital is also undergoing a $5.5-million energy retrofit expected to yield a 34-per-cent reduction in energy consumption. Improvements are being made in all corners of the facility’s operation. Enhancements include new building automation and direct digital controls; variable-speed pumps, drives and air handling units; glycol-based heat recovery systems; air and water optimization; lighting retrofits and redesigns; and laundry water and heat recovery. Hospital administrators are also considering other measures such as solar water and space heating; and co-generation to produce steam and electricity.

In the coming months, Prokopetz hopes to create a regional energy team to encourage further dialogue and information-sharing, a mechanism that would dovetail nicely with the Government of Ontario’s goal of encouraging better planning, collaboration, and coordination of services among regional hospitals.

“Up here, it’s better to work as a group,” O’Mara states. “We are always looking for ways to become more efficient. It makes sense to work together to evolve the industry so we can deliver better care to our respective patients.”

More Profiles >>