Today, as hospitals face the challenges of the Affordable Care Act, we are all under pressure to do more with less. This increases the demands on hospital based biomedical engineering programs to find ways to get the job done while simultaneously reducing resources. Adding to this difficulty is the tendency for some hospitals to increase their geographical footprint by adding offsite clinics, imaging departments and in some cases emergency care centers. These additional facilities not only mean more equipment to track and manage, but it also reduces your department efficiency as technicians consume valuable time travelling back and forth to these additional locations.
Under these trying circumstances you, unfortunately, do not have the option of cutting back on your services. Nurses, physicians and other caregivers continue to need equipment to meet the daily demands of delivering patient care. State and national accrediting agencies expect you to continue performing to their established standards and the various hospital committees you serve on expect your monthly reports to demonstrate that you are meeting all of your established objectives.
One way to reduce your workload is to do a retrospective analysis of work orders to identify the devices and conditions that consume most of your technicians’ time. Our analysis indicated that too much of our time was spent repairing damage. Based on our data, we realized that if we could reduce damage we would see a drop in the number of department work orders which would give us more time for other duties. In the past, we had attempted to reduce damage by educating users, but this had proven to be ineffective. Based on our past experience, we realized that continued attempts at user education would be a waste of time and would not result in a measureable reduction in our workload.
Since educating users in the past had not proven to be effective, we decided to take an engineering approach to solve the damage problem by looking for ways to make devices “damage proof”. Our data indicated that most of the damage occurred to infusion pumps, vital signs monitors and portable heart rate monitors. Our solution was to find an IV pole with a low center of gravity to prevent tipping and a bumper that would absorb any impact from hitting walls, doorways and etc. After researching the available market for IV poles, we found one made by Pryor products that met our specifications. It had a low center of gravity to prevent tipping, a bumper to prevent collision damage and five legs to eliminate the tipping caused when entering poorly leveled elevators.
After having indentified an IV pole that would allow us to reduce damage, we needed to convince the C-Suite to give us money to pay for them. We did this by outlining the benefits that the hospital would derive from purchasing these poles. We emphasized that reduced damage would minimize the risk of using a damaged device on a patient. We also discussed the system inefficiencies that occur when nurses attempt to use damaged devices. After discussing the impact on patient risk and nursing efficiency, we talked about the difficulties and time delays caused by ordering replacements for damaged components. Finally, we showed the total savings in terms of parts and labor that we could expect over the expected ten year lifetime of the new IV poles. Based on our arguments, we received funding for the new poles. As a result, the annual damage to devices in our hospital dropped dramatically which enabled us to cope with the increasing workload without having to add additional personnel.
