Reliability Radio EP 345: HIGH STAKES UPTIME Michael Bigelow - Seattle Children's Hospital

On this episode of Reliability Radio, hosts Jonathan Guiney and Brendan Russ welcome Michael Bigelow, Systems Engineering, Energy and Water Efficiency lead at Seattle Children's Hospital, to discuss the extreme measures taken to ensure the reliability of critical assets, specifically patient transport elevators.

In a facility where vertical transportation is essential for safety, accessibility, and the core mission, Michael details their holistic strategy:

• Defining Criticality: How a deep survey of patient experience, including the helicopter landing pad and emergency department access, drives their criticality analysis.

• The Performance Contract: A revolutionary approach to vendor management where financial incentives and penalties are tied directly to performance metrics like Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and callback rates.

• Data and Buy-In: The extensive process of aligning legal, sourcing, and frontline staff through the CMMS to ensure clean data and a unified understanding of the maintenance strategy, driven by the "why."

• The Future: Plans to deploy IoT telemetry to move from reactive tracking to anticipatory maintenance and optimize planned downtime.

This is a masterclass in how reliability principles are applied when asset failure has significant life-or-death implications.