Sponsored by Agiliti
By Tim Moss
Biomed engineers are caught in the middle of two interesting and accelerating trends in the U.S. health care market.
On one hand, emerging technologies like bioprinting, artificial intelligence, machine learning and wearables are creating new challenges for biomed teams. Clinical engineering departments are being pulled into strategic planning discussions about which technologies to acquire – and when and how to deploy them. Whether or not they’re included in strategic decision-making, biomed teams must handle the challenges and considerations of those new technologies – ranging from Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity and network security to basic service and support strategies for entirely new classes of hardware and software.
At the same time, biomed teams face greater demand than ever to provide service and support for more traditional (but no less critical) medical equipment – including devices used for respiratory and infusion therapy, patient monitoring, maternal and infant care, safe patient handling and patient mobility.
Hospitals need to evolve and take full advantage of new technologies, but they also need to provide patient care right now – and biomed teams are pulled between these two demands. The urgency of caring for patients in the hospital right this minute often prevents biomed teams and individual engineers from having sufficient time to understand and evaluate emerging technologies.
One hidden metric is making this time crunch far worse than it needs to be: medical equipment utilization.
Multiple studies show that utilization rates for ventilators, infusion pumps, specialty beds and other traditional equipment is less than 40%. The result? On the front end, hospitals are overspending on equipment rentals or purchases. On the back end, biomed teams are spending time maintaining and repairing more equipment than is needed – or they’re being stressed by service backlogs.
Hospitals are beginning to explore new ways of solving this equipment utilization dilemma. But before we explore those new approaches, let’s examine what’s contributing to this troubling underutilization issue:
- Equipment lost within the facility: The typical hospital has a surprisingly large amount of medical equipment hiding in closets or corners where it was mistakenly left. Sometimes equipment even walks out the front door with a patient.
- Backlogs in clinical engineering: CE teams are managing a growing volume of increasingly sophisticated medical equipment – a 62% increase in devices per bed over the past 20 years – that have more stringent compliance requirements. Yet, there hasn’t been a parallel rise in headcount for in-house teams.
- Equipment not patient-ready: Often, idle equipment isn’t broken, it’s just not being properly cleaned, serviced or managed in between patients. In fact, almost half of moveable medical equipment (MME) that is flagged as non-functional is due to user error.
- Lack of centralized process: Equipment management spans multiple departments. The lack of a centralized process ensuring clean, patient-ready equipment is accessible leads to a cycle of waste that drives perceived shortages and unnecessary requests for more rental equipment.
Biomed teams are preparing for unprecedented waves of new technology, while they’re still awash in service requests for highly underutilized equipment fleets. Adding to the stress is an increasing scarcity of qualified workers.
A growing number of U.S. hospitals are turning toward on-demand clinical engineering services to work through backlogs and handle the more mundane tasks of maintaining and servicing MME. Finding a regional clinical engineering service provider who can respond same-day to manage those tasks frees biomed teams to focus on more strategic work – like the evaluation, deployment and support of emerging technologies.
This mix of onsite MME management and highly flexible clinical engineering resources gives biomed departments and supply chain teams the insights — and the breathing room — they need to fully understand the realities of MME utilization. Once a hospital has a strong grasp of utilization and equipment management workflows, better strategic decisions can be made upstream, which leads to significant cost savings, reduced MME repair backlogs and, perhaps most important, more manageable workloads for in-house biomed teams.
Tim Moss is the director of resident based programs for Agiliti.