Sponsored by Medigate
By Samuel Hill, Director of Product Marketing at Medigate
Ever get tired of manually inputting information on your medical devices? Are you afraid you might miss a recall or scheduled maintenance? Worried you may be under-utilizing and over-investing in your fleet? These are all legitimate concerns that keep many BioMed and clinical engineers up at night.
The problem is Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS), which most healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) rely on to track and manage inventories, aren’t often connected directly to the devices they’re managing. They don’t have access to live traffic, and so they can’t capture real-time location, utilization, and other vital details for connected care delivery.
IT Asset Management (ITAM) and Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) don’t offer much relief either. Sure, they can capture information on IT assets, but they lack the clinical expertise and context to correctly identify and understand medical devices.
This creates enormous blind spots that bring costly and sometimes even dangerous operational omissions. For instance, if devices are mistakenly labeled “lost,” they can fall out of compliance when there’s a recall or need Preventative Maintenance (PM).
Inaccurate or missing device data can also inflate capital expenditures, leading to unnecessary purchases and replacements. In addition, you will be forced to manually fill the gaps by performing physical inventories and workflows, draining precious time and resources.
Making your decisions better and easier
A “live asset connection” to the CMMS with the appropriate clinical context can create a common foundation to address data deficiencies and optimize operations. By adding relevant device attributes to your CMMS – like OS version, network status, and security posture, as well as location and utilization information – you will then have the data needed to optimize your systems and processes (and not to mention, eliminate those manual, inefficient and soul-crushing elements you hate about device management).
Real-time device details can help you make all sorts of life cycle management decisions. For example, you can locate missing assets as soon as they connect and reinstate them so they’re available for patients. You can also accurately identify what’s impacted by recalls or security alerts and trigger the appropriate remediation work to reduce any risk to your operations. Under-utilized devices can be redeployed to where they’re needed most, maximizing their value and helping your organization avoid unnecessary capital expenditures.
By using fleet utilization data to facilitate device procurement, renting/leasing, retirement, and disposal decision-making (leading to potentially significant CAPEX and OPEX savings), you unlock the benefits of your inventory. Device location and utilization information can also be used to understand front-line care team preferences, improve patch planning, and optimize asset distributions to support appropriate PAR levels.
In summary, your life gets a lot easier, and life cycle management is a lot better when you have the information to efficiently and safely provide connected care. With a single source of truth, you can open up endless possibilities to streamline your operations and simplify your device management.