In southeast Fort Collins, Colorado, sits one of Banner Health’s newest medical facilities in the state. A full-service, acute-care hospital, Banner Fort Collins Medical Center offers emergency care, surgery, orthopedics, obstetrics, intensive care and many other services. The two-story facility includes 24 patient beds, two operating rooms and 17 pre-operative and post-anesthesia rooms.
The medical center opened in 2015 with 149 employees and 255 active staff physicians. Among the support staff at the facility is the regional clinical engineering team led by Area Services Director Tommy Lobato, CBET.
“Banner Fort Collins Medical Center is part of the Banner Health Western Region Clinical Engineering team,” Lobato says. “Most equipment is supported through our in-house team. This includes anesthesia, ultrasound, ventilators, nurse-call, etcetera. With 23 technicians on our team, we are able to assist one another with the strengths of other individual team members.”
“Tony Cody and Matthew Kolb are the Clinical Engineering Senior Managers of the North Colorado (NOCO) region which consists of Banner Fort Collins Medical Center, North Colorado Medical Center and McKee Medical Center,” Lobato adds.
Kevin Harrell, CBET, CRES, is the stand alone biomed assigned to Banner Fort Collins Medical Center during normal working hours. After hours support is provided by four technicians who provide support to 11 facilities across five states. Fort Collins includes equipment assets with a value of nearly $14 million.
The regional model that allows 23 HTM professionals to provide services to 11 hospitals requires support from all involved. Lobato likens it to having 23 technicians available to each hospital thought. At the same time, the biomeds housed in each facility are dedicated to that location.
The previous stand alone biomed at Fort Collins was Jon Fernbach. Fernbach agrees that there was never a sense of really working alone. He has 22 colleagues in the region who can be called upon for support.
“We also utilize a distributive model of service for high-end equipment: MRI, CT, imaging, anesthesia, ventilator, etcetera. This distributive service model is facilitated by internal Banner Technology Management resources,” Lobato adds.
“The facility opened on April 6, 2015. Although Jon Fernbach was the primary technician assigned to the hospital, there were many other team members that were a part of the acquisition and installation of the equipment,” Lobato points out.
“Scott Bauer was the Biomed Project Consultant who verified user needs, managed the equipment budget and oversaw the overall purchase. He was assisted by Fernbach (Biomed III), Peter Millington (Biomed II), Jeremy Whitt (Biomed II), Don Petering (Biomed II), and Bonnie Brown (Biomed II), who together made the opening possible.”
Regional Resources
Because the facility is so new, service contracts are not yet an issue, with most equipment still covered under warranty. Like many Banner locations, there is ample in-house talent to tackle most types of equipment.
“The goal of Banner Health Technology Management is to bring as much support in-house as possible through increasing the core competencies of the internal team; however there are some instances where this is not feasible,” Lobato says. “It is for this reason that all medical equipment service agreements are centrally managed through the Technology Management Department. This provides opportunities to leverage geography as well as economies of scale with respect to vendor relationships.”
Clinical engineering manages data through the use of the Phoenix Data Systems AIMS Computerized Maintenance Management System.
“Utilizing the Computerized Maintenance Management System, Banner Technology Management has set processes and protocols in place that allow for the utilization of data collection to drive our overall business strategies,” Fernbach says.
In the larger scheme of things, the Banner Health system includes the clinical engineering department and IT under the CIO. At the facility level, IT handles application issues, computer hardware, and networking, according to Fernbach. He says that clinical engineering has service responsibility for IT based systems such as: nurse call, patient monitoring, fetal monitoring, Natus and others.
Lobato adds that Banner Health has achieved a progressive level of software integration with respect to medical equipment transferring information in an electronic format to a clinical service line application housed in a Banner Health dedicated server farm.
“Banner Health has over two dozen unique applications that encompass the following clinical departments: Anesthesia, Cardiology, EEG, Endoscopy, Labor and Delivery, Medical Imaging, Surgical Video Integration, Radiation Oncology, Alarm/alert secondary monitoring and RTLS,” Lobato says.
“The service methodology to support the extensive list of software applications is a combination/collaboration of support lead by [the] Technology Management department and engaging Information Technology resources as needed,” he says.
Regional Resources
Anyone who has been a part of the launch of a new hospital knows that the considerations can be daunting.
“When I joined the project in October 2014, our project manager, Scott Bauer, was just beginning to order the equipment,” Fernbach remembers. “By early December, we were beginning to take delivery of nearly 2,000 pieces of equipment. With support from our local team, Scott and I were able to get everything tagged, inspected, and placed into service to meet our April 6 opening. We received Colorado State Health Department certification, and a few weeks afterwards Banner Fort Collins Medical Center passed its initial Joint Commission survey.”
Fernbach remembers that he arrived at the new hospital in December. He had been assisting with inventory since October. The area the biomeds were working in didn’t have any heat until the end of January or early February. They used Bair Huggers as personal heaters under their desks. Despite the inconvenience, Fernbach describes that time period as a “good time.”
Fernbach was excited to volunteer for the Fort Collins project. He has been with Banner for three years. After getting the new hospital off the ground, he moved to Banner’s North Colorado Medical Center and also works at a facility in Brush, Colorado, one day a week.
More recently, at the Fort Collins location, they have begun outfitting the last couple of rooms in the delivery area. This included about 20 pieces of equipment. A couple of clinics have also opened recently calling for the relocation of existing equipment as well as tagging and inventorying new equipment.
The overall result of the diverse and talented regional workforce has produced a net affect that is very good for the bottom line; the current cost of service ratio is less than five percent. Fernbach reports that the Fort Collins facility is running smoothly. Under the Banner clinical engineering model, it’s no surprise.