Kaiser Permanente has received one of the first Uptime InstituteBrill Awards for Efficient IT. The award recognizes the health care organization's efficiency in capital deployment, technology, design, operations and overall management of its data centers and IT operations.

"It says a lot that our data centers continue to shine for our leadership in energy efficiency," said Phil Fasano, executive vice president and chief information officer, Kaiser Permanente. "We understand how the health of our environment directly affects individual and community health, and we're so pleased that the Uptime Institute recognizes our commitment to improving the health of the communities we serve."

The Uptime Institute is a third-party research, education and consulting organization focused on improving data center performance and efficiency through collaboration and innovation. The Brill Awards attracted 100 entries from companies in 19 countries. Kaiser Permanente was one of 18 organizations to receive the recognition.  

"Kaiser Permanente's data center management team has demonstrated leadership and commitment to sustainability that will have a lasting impact on Kaiser Permanente's members, the Kaiser Permanente team, the IT industry and the data profession," said Pitt Turner, Uptime Institute's executive director emeritus. "We are proud to recognize Kaiser Permanente for embracing a culture of continuous improvement and shared team goals, in addition to sharing its best practices so that other organizations can learn from Kaiser Permanente's efforts."

Kaiser Permanente was distinguished by its extensive organizational collaboration. Interdisciplinary teams from across the organization have identified and implemented a number of initiatives that improve and sustain energy efficiency in the organization's national data centers.

Since 2008, Kaiser Permanente's data centers have:

Avoided more than 100 gigawatt hours of electrical energy usage, equivalent to more than 6,200 average homes' energy use for one year.

Avoided approximately $10.5 million in electrical utility costs.

Prevented nearly 53,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere, equivalent to taking more than 11,000 passenger cars off the road for one year.

Thanks to its focus on energy efficiency, Kaiser Permanente is using nearly 20 percent less electricity to cool its national data center facilities and computer room floors than it did five years ago. The health care organization also has the only LEED Platinum certified data center in the world for building operation and management. Three of Kaiser Permanente's data centers are Energy Star rated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. The health care organization also received the Uptime Institute's 2011 Green Enterprise IT Award for developing a new way to measure optimized cooling in data centers and was ranked No.1 on IDG's Computerworld magazine Top 12 List of Green-IT Organizationsthat same year.