Dive Brief:

• Faced with an “exponential increase” in lithium battery use at its facilities and limited guidance from national standards-setting organizations, Mayo Clinic developed its own full-lifecycle battery safety protocols that balanced risk and function, four representatives for the nonprofit medical system said at a healthcare facilities conference this month.
• Over an iterative, multi-year process that continues today, Mayo staff developed protocols for procurement, safe use and handling, charging, storage and disposal of lithium batteries, they told a session at the ASHE Health Care Facilities Innovation Conference in Minneapolis on Aug. 4.
• The process produced multiple documents that Mayo now uses internally, including guidelines for general lithium battery safety and electric vehicle charging areas, a risk-assessment template and safe management procedures for battery-powered autonomous robots, said Patricia Hlavka, Mayo’s compliance manager.

Dive Insight:

Hlavka said Mayo staff expect to update the documents they’ve created as new products and standards become available, create a chemical inventory management system that includes the locations and quantities of lithium batteries and develop a third-party risk management process to catch issues with battery-powered devices before they reach Mayo’s facilities.

The process kicked off about five years ago, when Mayo replaced the lead-acid backup batteries in its telephone switch rooms with lithium-based batteries, Hlavka said. Mayo staff realized that because there were no overarching national safety standards for the technology, they’d need to take matters into their own hands — and that would require a cross-department effort.

“We learned early on that we needed a team — I wasn’t going to go down alone,” said Hlavka, who, like everyone on the panel, said she spoke in her personal capacity, not Mayo’s.

Today, Mayo has lithium batteries in a dizzying array of devices, from laptops and hand tools to mobile floor-cleaning robots and stationary energy storage systems. Some of these devices have formal governing codes, such as the National Fire Protection Association’s NFPA 855 standard for stationary energy storage systems, said Alan Mennecke, a design engineer on Mayo Clinic’s battery safety working group. 

NFPA is expediting development of its broader NFPA 800 standard, which would cover portable battery-powered devices, but it’s not yet in final form, Mennecke said.

In the meantime, battery adoption is poised to increase across the healthcare industry, with autonomous applications — new robot forms and functions — looking particularly promising, said Josh Humpal, a Mayo Clinic innovation engineer. One persistent problem, he said, is that responsibility for Mayo’s current and future battery inventory spans numerous individuals and departments.

“The challenge we see with rapid adoption and scaling [of lithium batteries] is the fragmented ownership of the tech itself,” Humpal said. “We don't [yet] have the means to get an effective view” of batteries’ design, chemistry, charging locations and compliance with internal standards, he added. 

Hlavka said Mayo has had a number of battery-related safety incidents over the past 10 years. Several were caused by accidental shredding of batteries at its internal recycling facility, she said; two others were traced to battery-charging devices and another to a battery-powered floor scrubber. Mayo more recently began cataloging defective batteries coming into its facilities, with 17 so far this year, she said.

“It’s not a question of if this happens, but when — and the other question we’re asking is, ‘where?’” Hlavka said. 

That’s one of many questions healthcare facilities staff and their bosses need to ask about lithium batteries, Mennecke said. Other considerations that guided Mayo’s internal battery safety process:

• Where batteries are stored, charged, staged and used.
• Whether battery-powered devices are rated as electrically safe by a certifying body such as the Underwriters Laboratories. “You’d be surprised how much equipment out there is not ... UL listed,” Mennecke said.
• What hazard controls are needed to ensure battery safety, such as hardening charging rooms against fire damage and separating charging from other essential building systems or operations.
• Whether the risk justifies expensive hazard mitigation costs. “Building one-hour-[fire]-rated rooms ain’t cheap,” he said.
• The potential implications for Mayo’s insurance coverage.
• Internal accountability. “Who are the people above our pay grade who are willing to make these decisions,” he said.
• What external resources are available to support battery safety initiatives.

On that last point, Mennecke said the finalized NFPA 800 standard and an ASHE battery safety task force would both help healthcare facilities looking for external guidance on battery safety — and a welcome change from the status quo.

“Right now, there's nothing out there that says I have to do something to address the lithium battery safety issue,” he said.