With technology progress, the hospitals have started using advanced medical equipment and patient health data electronically, which needs effective management. A little room for inefficiency in managing living space and infrastructural equipment hurts productivity and improves liability risks as well. The solution to healthcare technology management is- CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System).
From small medical clinics and rehab centres to multispecialty, hospitals are keeping up with technology innovation for seamless asset and maintenance management. However, using legacy CMMS could only help with work order management and documentation and won’t integrate with other systems. Also, it poses security risks, doesn’t optimize the supply chain, and can’t manage the high-end medical equipment. All in all, the legacy CMMS system won’t allow hospitals to step in with digital transformation.
A modernized CMMS solution is all-imperative to streamline maintenance management functions, which are essential to allow hospitals to work at peak efficiency. Before digging into the depth of the advantages of embracing CMMS, we will take a look at the challenges that the hospital biomedical department is facing.
Common Maintenance Challenges That Hospitals Are Facing
- The hospital struggle with the aging biomedical technical workforce who can’t maintain and service the advanced biomedical equipment efficiently.
- The biomedical devices are internet-connected from where the critical patient data is either tampered with or unauthorizedly accessed. It raises security risks.
- Comply with regulatory standards for scheduled maintenance activities of every device.
- The hospitals suffer from healthcare-associated infections that need to address immediately.
- The unoptimized supply chain strategies lead to shortages of equipment utilization. The hospitals either buy new equipment or take them for rent. It poses another problem, that’s existing medical equipment underutilization.
- The limited ability to obtain operational data for medical device management resulted in inefficient full-lifecycle asset management.
- Performing the jobs on multiple devices requires access to information on tools and procedures in real-time, which is unavailable conventionally.
The Advantages Of Implementing Advanced CMMS In The Hospital
- Work order inspections get organized
The corrective work orders are identified only when the system detects the failed inspection points. The best approach is to issue work orders to different personnel alongside specifying their roles for figuring out and fixing the failures if detected. The regular inspections alleviate complications and proactively keep the maintenance issues at bay. This is managed well by the CMMS solution. It enables managers to assign work, track progress, and check if it’s completed on time or not.
- System responsiveness gets uplifted
Resource mismanagement often results in improper work allocation. It won’t allow the priority work to be done at first. When emergency issues occur, the system can’t respond effectively. The CMMS makes it a breeze. The software automatically prioritizes the work orders based on resource availability, inventory levels, and tasks importance. If required, the priorities are changed, and the maintenance personnel are sent for faster troubleshooting. Also, the multi-device compatibility facilitates information exchange in real-time and faster and precise troubleshooting by the maintenance personnel. It improves productivity.
- Take labor management up a notch
Let’s accept: labor management is a hard nut to crack in. Organizing work orders planning, shift scheduling, task completion, and work delegation- is laborious. The CMMS software can accomplish it in a flick of the switch. It enables the managers to access current maintenance schedules and then assign the work in a pre-defined order. When preventive maintenance is required, the task allocation is shuffled up and instantly informed to the respective laborers. Also, the CMMS offers a high degree of freedom for customization to meet the hospitals’ needs.
- Help you comply with regulatory compliance
The healthcare industry has to keep up with compliance codes and regulations to match the standards required during performance audits. Manually, tracking everything is a daunting task. That’s where CMMS is the biggest rescuer.
The CMMS software organizes and safely store all the data, and generate reports for audits that helps a ton in ensuring the medical equipment working efficiently and precisely. These reports are a great help when government audits are made. What’s more?
The compliance tasks are automated by CMMS with notifications setting, routine maintenance scheduling, repair history log tracking, and document organization for every medical equipment. Thereby efficiently maintaining the medical devices and performing compliant operations becomes easy.
- Ensure robust security
The healthcare staff can solely focus on providing the best treatment to the patients when every medical device and infrastructural equipment performs as expected. CMMS software support every healthcare function with inventory management, real-time insights into assets, and equipment maintenance. The information about everything from the HVAC system and elevator maintenance to medical equipment is monitored by CMMS, which allows staff to do what they intend to do.
- Asset and equipment tracking
With the capability to track a wide range of medical equipment, including medical imaging machines, surgical devices, medical lasers, life support equipment, and infusion pumps, the maintenance gets scheduled accordingly. Plus, the lifecycle information of every asset, such as downtime, hours spent by technicians, and reliability, allows the maintenance personnel to fix the problem right away.
The asset lifecycle management from acquisition to final disposition showcases the exact cost of ownership of the medical asset. It enables the healthcare organization to best respond to system security, optimize equipment utilization, and make data-driven decisions.
Conclusion
The range of advantages that modern CMMS brought to hospitals of different specialities and sizes clear up that it’s the right time to upgrade the system to CMMS for healthcare technology management. If you are experiencing a lack of real-time visibility, outdated paper processes, limited integration capabilities, compliance issues, and security issues, get connected with our business consultant to get needed help with the best maintenance solution.