In June, David Chambers, CBET and director, facilities management for Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center co-presented with Rich Sable, CBET and product manager for EQ2 LLC a case study on a large-scale project that brought together the hospital system’s biomed, facilities, and supply chain operations, with new workflows and technologies. The presentation was titled “Cradle to Grave Asset Management Using Best Practices, Benchmarking, and Standardization.”
The project started out as a need to replace one old, legacy CMMS system that was no longer supported at one hospital and turned into a need to replace a total of three outside CMMS systems and a customized in-house system across six hospitals and 26 clinics. EQ2’s “HEMS” CMMS was chosen with its long history of managing health care assets.
The biomed and facilities departments formed a best practices committee leading systems and processes change for data governance and best practices were developed. For example, one device would have one contract instead of four different ones at four different locations.
There were also different PM procedures and PM intervals being used at the various locations. These were standardized with some exceptions and a new service level agreement for response and turnaround times was established.
As biomed and facilities were employing these solutions, supply chain entered the picture to manage details of assets from when they were first purchased (such as purchase orders, purchase price, warranty/contract dates) and when they were retired. An interface of HEMS to the procurement system eCAPS was put in place. The entire lifecycle of each device is now maintained in HEMS. Total cost of ownership and value of the assets is clear across the enterprise.
A governance board was formed to handle any questions or concerns related to process, access permissions, for data standardization, etc.
A 90-day test pilot was completed at one hospital first. This led to some security setting and workflow changes. Then, the new asset management process was rolled out to the remaining five hospitals in two days.
New processes were created for converting leased to owned inventory, sending equipment for offsite repair, annual/biannual inventory reconciliation, salvage, new service contracts for existing assets, one-day equipment rentals, donated equipment, and updating existing asset information.
Later IT began using HEMS to manage assets over $500 and an interface of HEMS to Cherwell for IT ticketing was established.
In the end, numerous benefits were gained by the time everything was in place. Medical device recalls are simpler and the correct status of each device – owned or leased for example – is easily identified. The latter meets the Joint Commission requirement of having an inventory of every device at the various sites of the enterprise.
