[Abstract] By using a supervising and management system that integrates four subsystems—electricity loss monitoring system, water supply monitoring system, central air conditioning energy-saving monitoring system, and security monitoring system—hospital administrators can quickly and efficiently complete daily hospital management, improve unified dispatch capabilities, solve the problems of decentralized control departments and poor financial integration, avoid the waste of human and material resources caused by system decentralization, realize resource sharing among various subsystems, significantly reduce the number of operation and management personnel and equipment maintenance personnel, improve personnel efficiency, and ensure the efficient operation of the hospital.
Introduction
The current situation at the General Hospital of the Military Region is as follows: The hospital's building monitoring system is a separate control system for each building. The staff and officers' building, the medical technology building, and the inpatient department each have their own security monitoring system, water supply monitoring system, power consumption monitoring system, central air conditioning energy-saving monitoring system, fire monitoring system, and elevator operation system, all controlled independently. This decentralized control not only fails to achieve resource sharing between the various subsystems but also results in a significant waste of human and material resources and increases the difficulty of unified management for administrators.
Integrated hospital management can significantly improve resource integration and staff efficiency, meeting the requirements of modern hospital management. Surveys show that integrating various subsystems can save 30% on personnel costs; extend equipment lifespan; save energy, reducing annual electricity and water costs by 10%-15% (equivalent to saving over 100,000 kWh annually for a 1 million kWh electricity consumption), resulting in an economic value of approximately 80,000 yuan; achieve short-term investment with long-term benefits; and adapt to future development needs. The system's scalability is more flexible; after integration, interfaces are more open, allowing for the integration of many standard technologies, such as network interfaces and protocols, maximizing system capacity and enhancing operational stability. Furthermore, system integration greatly improves the hospital's automation level, facilitating the comprehensive coordination of subsystems, reducing error rates, and making system redundancy design more rational and practical. All of these factors contribute to extending equipment lifespan, reducing failure rates, improving overall hospital maintenance and management efficiency, and minimizing unnecessary energy consumption. To achieve standardized, intelligent, and digital management of hospitals, system integration is imperative.
Two-system analysis
During the technical feasibility study, system analysts should collect information on system performance, reliability, maintainability, and manufacturability; analyze the various equipment, technologies, methods, and processes required to achieve the system's functions and performance; and analyze the potential technical risks of project development and the impact of technical problems on development costs.
The technologies involved in this system mainly include databases, a visual programming language, and database access interfaces. Currently popular databases include Access, SQL Server, Oracle Database Application Server, and MySQL. All of these databases can meet the data storage requirements of this system.
Visual programming languages mainly include Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Java. Among them, Visual Basic and Visual C++ can establish seamless connections with Access databases, SQL Server databases, etc.
Overall Design of Three Systems
1 System Structure Planning
This system (as shown in Figure 2) adopts a master-slave working mode, with multiple slave devices connected to the communication bus, each operating on an equal footing. To identify each slave device, the master computer needs to assign it a unique hexadecimal address, similar to an Ethernet card's MAC address. This address is unique on the RS485 bus. When the master computer needs to monitor a target slave device, it first sends a numbered address frame onto the RS485 bus. Each slave device on the bus receives this address frame and performs a check. If the target address matches its own, the slave device is selected and is required to receive and send monitoring data (i.e., send and receive data frames). Otherwise, it exits and returns to the address frame receiving state. The data exchange process (including connection establishment and data exchange) uses a question-and-answer approach. The master computer queries the slave device, and the slave device responds only after receiving the response. Data exchange continues only after receiving the response. This method avoids unordered data communication between multiple slave devices, preventing disruption of data transmission across the entire network.
Because the General Hospital of the Military Region contains many departments and numerous field devices such as water meters, electricity meters, temperature sensors, and humidity sensors, the data acquisition devices for each physical quantity communicate and transmit data to the host computer. The data acquisition devices cannot continuously transmit data to the host computer, nor can the host computer constantly receive data. Therefore, a master-slave structure is adopted between the host computer and the data acquisition devices. The host computer provides the data acquisition devices with corresponding control codes (see Figure 1 for the specific encoding). Each control code corresponds to a specific meter in a specific department. After receiving the control code, each data acquisition device transmits the corresponding meter value information for that department to the host computer. This avoids incomplete data transmission and improves the efficiency and accuracy of data acquisition.
2. Coding Design
The coding design includes the data storage format of the data collector in the database, the data transmission format from the data collector to the host computer, and the control code format from the host computer to the slave computer. For example, the coding of department numbers. The data transmission format from the data collector to the host computer and the control code format from the host computer to the data collector are determined by the data transmission format of the hardware (data collector). The coding of the main parameters is listed below.
Figure 1-1 Department Number Coding
(2) Data format transmitted from the lower-level machine to the upper-level machine
Figure 1-2 Data encoding transmitted from the lower-level machine to the upper-level machine
Figure 1-3 Host computer control code
Figure 2 System hierarchy diagram
Four-system simulated on-site debugging
During system debugging, the lack of actual hardware (electricity meter, water meter, temperature sensor, humidity sensor, camera) prevented on-site debugging. Therefore, the upper-level monitoring could only be simulated in the laboratory. The simulation was divided into three stages, selected based on the manual processing and automatic acquisition requirements in the serial port event processing submodule and the master-slave structure between the host computer and the data acquisition unit.
Phase 1: Manually handling serial port events
(1) Simulation equipment: two microcomputers, one RS232 serial cable; simulation software: serial port debugging assistant
(2) Design idea: When the receiving buffer receives 11 bytes (one frame of data), the data is saved to the database.
(3) Specific implementation: On the lower computer (one of the microcomputers), use the serial port debugging assistant to manually send data frames (which conform to the encoding format of data transmission from the lower computer to the upper computer). The upper computer runs the program and selects the manual accept button in the serial port event handling window.
(4) Simulation results: Electricity, water volume, collection time, temperature, humidity, etc., can all be collected and stored in the corresponding database. The host computer monitoring can also realize data recording, data charts, and real-time curve query functions. The expected design requirements are met—whether the system can run.
(5) Disadvantages: poor flexibility, the collection time cannot be set, it can only meet one-to-one data collection, and lacks practicality.
Phase Two: Timed Sampling
The general process is similar to the first stage, the difference being that data transmission from the lower-level machine (analog data acquisition device) is changed to timed transmission, and the timed receive checkbox is selected in the upper-level machine's serial port event handling window. The simulation results meet the expected requirements—approaching the actual data acquisition.
Phase 3: Simulating actual data acquisition from multiple slave devices (data collectors)
(1) Simulation equipment: two microcomputers and one RS232 serial port cable; simulation software: lower computer program and database, upper computer program and database, upper computer serial port debugging assistant, lower computer serial port debugging assistant.
(2) Design concept and specific implementation
The lower-level serial port debugging assistant is used to transmit data frames from the lower-level machine to the upper-level machine, while the upper-level serial port debugging assistant is used to transmit control codes from the upper-level machine to the lower-level machine. Simultaneously, the lower-level machine contains a lower-level program and a database. The database stores department numbers and corresponding table values/codes, effectively simulating multiple slave devices. Because the data from various meters or sensors in the actual field originate from a specific department, when the data acquisition device collects data, it not only collects the numerical values but also records which building, floor, department, and table the table originated from. Therefore, a record in the database, or a table code, actually represents a specific table in a specific department, which can also be seen from the data format transmitted by the data acquisition device. The lower-level program's function is to receive control codes from the upper-level machine, read the table code values from the control code data frames, query the corresponding table code record in the table value/code database, and transmit the table value to the upper-level machine. The host computer program receives data frames, performs data judgment, reads the table code and table value, adds parameters such as the acquisition time to these two data and saves them to the database for use by the host monitoring (the main screen of the host monitoring is shown in Figure 3).
(3) Simulation results
Firstly, the data acquisition function can be realized. Various meter values and sensor values can be collected to the host computer as required and stored in the corresponding data tables in the database. For example, water meter values are saved to the WaterRealTime data table in the "Water, Electricity and Air Conditioning Data" database, and air conditioning temperature values can be collected to the "Air Conditioning Data of Three Buildings" data table. The stored data includes not only the department number, meter value, water meter value, and temperature value, but also the collection time.
Next, the upper-level monitoring system verified the implementation of each functional module. Excluding the system management module, help module, data backup and recovery module, and reports, the remaining verification focused on the data record query module and the data chart module. The verification results showed that the data record query module could retrieve all records for a specific department prior to the query time, including water usage, electricity usage, and air conditioning data. The data chart module's real-time curve function was verified by comparing the X-axis scale values with the acquisition time and the corresponding Y-axis values with the acquired values, confirming that the real-time curve function was functional.
Figure 3. Main screen of the integrated management system's supervisory monitoring.
V. Conclusion
The establishment of the integrated system has provided new ideas for the intelligent management of the military general hospital and offered specific solutions for improving the hospital's level of automation.
About the author:
Meng Xianpeng (1987-)
