FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


(l-r) Tom Shepard, Director of Facilities Engineering Department for Cleveland Clinic Foundation and Scott Lisec, President of Operations for CHT, LLC

Friday, March 17, 2006
Nathan Carrick
Director of Marketing

CHT LLC (CHT) has reached an agreement on a Piped Medical Gas Program called CHx that incorporates testing, maintenance, and monitoring into one program through joint partnerships with industry leaders. This groundbreaking program is aimed at helping medical facilities achieve compliance with JCAHO, NFPA 99, and ASSE Series 6000 guidelines. The initial CHx program has undergone development and implementation, with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) main campus in Cleveland, OH being used as the Beta testing site.

The CHT compliance program, termed CHx (C – Compliance Hx – History), has been designed from the ground up in cooperation with CCF to help hospitals understand and improve the quality of their medical gas systems. This is the first program that brings asset management, preventive maintenance, and repair together, managing all three aspects using a powerful software system based on CHIEF v5.0 CMMS. Bringing this program online at the CCF’s Cleveland, OH campus allows CCF to monitor and improve its performance and thus improve patient safety.

Implementation of this program has been based on the guidance of ASSE Series 6000 and NFPA 99 codes, which brings CCF to the forefront in the medical community for becoming JCAHO compliant in regards to the Medical Gas Requirements.

Following a detailed project plan and starting with the medical gas systems at the CCF main campus, CHT crews have been working to test and collect specific information on the entire medical gas system from the source equipment to the zone valve boxes, alarm panels, and outlets across the entire CCF campus. Every piece is tested, cataloged, and entered into the proprietary CHx software. From here, any part of the system that is found to be either deficient or outside of ASSE Series 6000, NFPA 99, or JCAHO regulations is flagged. A program for repair and then ongoing preventive maintenance is put into effect based on the information gathered during the testing phase.

The net result is a JCAHO compliant medical gas Program, significantly reduced patient risk, and an accurate overview on the health and wellbeing of the medical gas system in place at CCF.