By Chace Torres, CBET, CHTM
I want to impart some knowledge, give some tips, tricks, and tools to younger cats out there getting into the field service realm of biomed. Maybe it’s your first time jumping into it. I have noticed there is a trend of people leaving biomed programs, going after their first job, getting out of the military and getting into field service. So, there’s more of an interest in it, which is great. Working for an independent service organization can be very rewarding. You get to be a hero with multiple medical facilities across your region. So, it can be an awesome experience. The things that I’m going to talk about today are simply things to note that I’ve witnessed doing the job and seeing technicians implement or fail to implement these tasks.
Number one, you need to be comfortable being uncomfortable in field service. While you can plan somewhat because of scheduled PM intervals, field service is very reactionary. You can have days where it is extremely hectic and you have to adapt, acclimate, and hit the ground running.
An example of this was last week when I had two sites with scheduled for preventative maintenance inspections. Before I left my house for the first site, I got a call that a dialysis scale went down and they were unable to accurately weigh patients. In dialysis, the before and after weights for patients are very important, and this was their only scale.
Luckily, they had a load cell on hand. I was able to get out there, swap out the load cell, recalibrate the scale, get them up and going, and head to my first scheduled PM. After leaving the first place, four more service calls came in for incoming inspections for electrical safety of loaner devices. Essentially two scheduled visits turned into adding 5 more locations in one day. You’ve got to be comfortable being uncomfortable. If you can do that and you thrive in it, you will be successful in field service.
Secondly, you must be able to manage yourself. Take, for instance, those seven calls. All of that has to be properly documented, properly billed out, and properly scheduled. Time management is paramount in field service. Besides the client service aspect, you have management of your mileage reimbursement, handling your time clock, responding to/sending emails. A lot of things will be occurring at once all throughout the workday. Technicians get let go in field service because they don’t manage their time and fall behind, work piles up and it creates a snowball effect.
It ends up impacting their productivity, which for most organizations in an ISO capacity your time is equivalent to what you’re billing back. For example, we expect 75% of your time to be billed back to the client. Which might seem high to some people that aren’t familiar with it, but it’s really not. For an in-house position, it’s going to be much more of your time that has to be captured. Time placed on every device, call, email, etc. Believe it or not, several technicians are able to get a 100% captured productivity every single day for their time. It’s how you manage and how you document it. If you can do that, you will be successful.
Number three, in field service you will likely spend a lot of time in your car. You will be taking calls, sending emails, scheduling stuff while you’re on the road. You can spend a third to two thirds of your day in the car.
Traffic is just part of the job. And some people can’t handle being in their car for an extended amount of time. Not to mention, driving a lot is going to impact the maintenance on your car, requiring more of you keeping up with your car, because your car is your livelihood. And I’ve had people have issues with that.
You can explain what to expect on the job as a biomed in field service to somebody, but until they actually experience it, they won’t know for sure if it’s right for them. I’ve had people do a year on the job in field service and come to the realization that they would actually prefer sitting at a bench every day and working on a pallet of IV pumps. Some people are built for the field service mentally, and some people are not. It’s a little bit more fast-paced. It’s very reactionary, but there are benefits. I would say that I am a very well-rounded general biomed because of all the years that I’ve put into field service. I’ve worked on dozens of the same type of modality, different manufacturers, different makes and models, different revisions. You will see every single thing you possibly could see out in the wild, hitting different calls in different locations because every site’s going to have something different. You could have one hospital that just loves Stryker or loves GE. Then you could have another hospital that loves Olympus, Karl Storz, or Mindray. You get to experience so many different types of the medical infrastructure than you would as an in-house physician.
This is not me bagging on in-house positions because they also have benefits. Being in-house, you get the opportunity to work alongside senior biomeds. You get to work alongside other coworkers. So, knowledge sharing, left seat, right seat training, the opportunity to have more of a mentorship, oversight, and the ability to fail and be lifted up is a little bit easier in-house because you have that support system. It’s a little bit harder to do it in field service because, more often than not, you are not working alongside each other every day. Most of the time it’s me giving them a call saying, “Hey, what’s going on? How is everything doing? What can I do to assist you?” All of us are texting one another about “Have you seen this issue before?” Lastly, let’s just consider that you’re going to be largely independent.
With that independence over the years, you pick up on some things. I’m going to give you a quick run down. Coffee in the morning is life. Don’t expect to stay clean for long – extra shirts or scrubs come in handy. I’ve had hydraulic fluid dump on my clothes and in my mouth. I’ve ripped the crotch of my pants on several occasions. Having a power bank to charge your tablet or phone is a very clutch move as well. I listen to music all the time between driving or doing PMs/repairs. Build your playlists for different moods because you will experience many thresholds of emotion in this career. Invest in your comfort. I rock the Sketchers slip-ons with memory foam or cowboy boots for non-surgical days, because I’m on my feet all day. Field service techs usually have to provide their own tools. You don’t need the latest and greatest but if you see something out there you think will make you more proficient or quicker doing a job … splurge! The better equipped you are, the better the service for our medical facilities. Hope you got something out of this and keep doing great things one service stop at a time.
