Sponsored by Medigate
Now known by its acronym, imagine how asset-intensive businesses, like health care, were previously managed without the help of Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS). We’ve quickly moved from glorified spreadsheets to industry-specialized SaaS solutions integrated with cloud-based Configuration Management Databases (CMDB). Health care CIOs now invest in these systems with an expectation of a return on assets. In short, health care CMMS is evolving in an asset utilization context. These systems are now regarded as indicators of overall productivity.
But let’s take a step back. For health care providers, a CMMS has always been an obvious step toward proactive, predictive maintenance. CMMS improves biomedical inter-departmental communications. It improves work order coordination and its existence answers questions surrounding inventory management directives.
But CMMS is ultimately defined by the quality of the information it hosts (i.e. garbage in/garbage out). This isn’t an indictment, but a reminder. It is for this reason that health care’s CMMS platforms now enable the configuration of clinically specialized workflows, as those workflows help automate the capture of incremental data. For example, as maintenance interventions occur and actions are recorded, the CMMS is updated, continuously increasing data accuracy.
What else are health care’s market leading CMMS platforms doing? Mobile extensions now capture data during device onboarding processes. They may leverage various types of scanning technologies and use smart device-based templates to consolidate information about the asset. They are aligning with device manufacturer portals to ease access to parts, pricing and security patches. These systems may facilitate remediation workflows by reconciling MDS2 data and correlating vulnerabilities to potentially impacted assets.
Most importantly, given modern APIs and how the cloud has generally eased data integration, these systems can be integrated and synced with complementary systems throughout the asset management and security ecosystem. The following recommendations should be considered, as they are increasingly regarded as best practices:
- Vendors that are health care-specialized should be selected. Connected medicine is driving value-based reimbursement models. Spending on connected assets is exploding (~20% CAGR) and revolutionizing care delivery. Investing in a CMMS that isn’t well-versed in the asset management and security challenges of modern connected medicine would be shortsighted, to say the least.
- Leading CMMS solutions should allow health systems to configure cross-functionally integrated workflows. For example, Medigate monitors connected device vulnerabilities in real-time, correlates newly published threats to the devices that may be impacted and monitors unauthorized communications. That means that alerts can trigger work orders in CMMS, route them to the appropriate staff, prepopulate that workflow with full remediation context and then resolve the actions taken. In other words, all relevant systems (e.g. CMMS, CMDB, trouble-ticketing systems) are continuously synchronized. The benefit of having a single source of truth speaks for itself.
- At a minimum, the CMMS should be meaningfully integrated throughout the health system’s asset management and cybersecurity ecosystem. Beyond Biomed, stakeholders now include IT, InfoSec, Clinical Engineering, Supply Chain/Procurement and Finance. I say “meaningfully integrated” to distinguish between simple API-based data exchanges versus integrations that have been engineered to solve known problems using the aforementioned “integrated workflows.”
The real-time healthcare system (RTHS) is about driving non-traditional stakeholder systems to share and apply medical knowledge as close to real-time as possible. Workflows must accelerate and business processes must streamline. More detailed understandings of capacity and demand should lead to improvements in asset utilization. Fingertip access to medical device location, status and patient needs are going to combine more fluidly, accelerate redeployment cycles and drive meaningful improvements in productivity and patient care. I’m describing what is known as the “orchestration layer” in the RTHS so clearly, CMMS plays an obvious, significant role.
Market-leading CMMS vendors are embracing the RTHS message and solution evaluators should as well, as it’s an inevitable truth. As patient diagnostics and care delivery accelerate, CMMS-workflows must and will adapt accordingly.
Jonathan Langer is the CEO and co-founder of Medigate.