The American Society for Health Care Engineering (ASHE) of the American Hospital Association announces the launch of a new Energy to Care Dashboard Tool, offering an at-a-glance view of healthcare facilities’ energy use. The Energy to Care Dashboard has been designed to be highly visual to reduce user burden as much as possible: With the dashboard, monitoring and observing energy use is as simple as using a fitness tracker to 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, ASHE officials say. Using the new tool will only take 15 minutes a day to search for energy-saving findings that can influence around half of each healthcare facility’s 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. 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,” says ASHE Interim Executive Director Dale Woodin.

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

  • 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 log-ins are no longer required
    • Energy and facility data can be directly uploaded with Microsoft Excel templates
    • Data can be imported or 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.