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By Abdul Alsaadi
CEO of Medzon
Companies are racing to get their organization ISO certified, knowing one day it might be a requirement to work in a hospital maintaining medical equipment. ISO 9001:2015 prepares companies with quality procedures to consistently provide products and services that meet customer regulatory requirements, enhance customer satisfaction and assure documentation is in place for inspections. The certification process for ISO 9001:2015 creates specific requirements for a quality management system when an organization:
a) needs to demonstrate its ability to consistently provide products and services that meet customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements, and
b) aims to enhance customer satisfaction through the effective application of the system, including processes for improvement of the system and the assurance of conformity to customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.
Being ISO certified is great. It means the company or the tech working in hospitals is qualified to do the job, this gets into quality of service along with competency of candidates. ISO will be the inspector when it’s time to renew the certification in assuring the policies and procedures are being practiced correctly by providing strong documentation and providing constant training of staff on policy and procedures.
It is difficult to guarantee that each organization will hire the right person for the right task or will utilize the resources to train individuals, this goes back to business ethics and the leader leading the organization.
Hospital systems have many departments that are swamped with their own individual meetings, duties to fulfill, and quality to deliver to patients. Hospitals that are short on staff and need support will tend to hire a third-party company to help with the responsibilities in the biomedical department. The manager or director hopes that the companies have qualified staff, quality of service and are certified as a management company in assuring documentation is in place for any type of inspection. This is where the benefit of hiring a third-party vendor, who is ISO certified, is seen.
ISO companies need to learn and understand the services each company is offering. To be involved with the quality and competencies of staffing is an important factor for following policy procedures and documentation. It is only half of the puzzle; the other half is making sure that the candidate working in the organization prioritizes safety in this industry. The ISO certification process is not an easy one and is monitored on a yearly basis to guarantee each company is documenting and training staff accordingly. This certification holds value. When a hospital is looking to outsource equipment maintenance it should take this into consideration and select a reliable candidate.
– Abdul Alsaadi, Ph.D., is the CEO of Medzon.
