For better or worse, the world of biomed and HTM is constantly evolving and adapting to new realities, whether that's advances in technology or challenges faced by the whole industry. We recently discussed many of the top issues that HTM professionals are currently facing in our roundtable-style webinar.
FSI’s team of experts, Kevin Lund, Solutions Engineer with 40+ years in healthcare service management, and Charles van der Laan, Project Manager with 32+ years of HTM experience, aimed to demystify key issues by breaking down how HTM professionals should think about challenging headlines and how the right CMMS can help their teams find success.
Preventive Maintenance
One of the most significant ways to ensure your healthcare system’s medical equipment always functions correctly is to perform preventive maintenance. Every HTM department performs PMs, but each one has a different way of doing them.
“There’s multiple ways of doing your PM program - whether you’re all OEM or AEM, risk based, reliability centered, or evidence-based maintenance, all of these programs are going to require you to plan out your inventory,” shared Charles. “Also, you need to know the equipment type you have, departments you need to work with, resources you have, and the estimated time for those particular items. With all of those combined, you’ll be able to forecast reports.”
Additionally, a key feature with your CMMS – notifications – ensures technicians never miss an upcoming PM.
To locate assets more quickly with FSI’s CMS, monitor where devices are with a combination of an RTLS integration and CMS View, which depicts assets on a floorplan. Utilizing detailed floor plans will cut time locating devices and improve how your team monitors assets and work orders.
Asset Inventory Standardization
Using a combination of dropdowns and free text in your asset inventory can lead to duplications and inaccuracies. The best way to maintain an accurate and complete inventory is to ensure your entire team is using the same nomenclature and asset categories.
“The primary asset features that HTM must manage includes the asset’s manufacturer, model number and name, and also the asset category for standardizing the naming structure,” Kevin noted. “All other features, such as risk assessment, PM scheduling priority, etc. can be based on those three items.”
If you’ve been using both drop downs and free text, then it’s time to clean up your asset data. Ensure categories are being pulled from one database that has standardized nomenclature, including accurate manufacturer, model number/name, and category. Going through the assets themselves to make sure all records are pulling from the primary database will increase the accuracy of your inventory.
Regulatory Compliance
Your CMMS can play an important role in helping to maintain regulatory compliance. Dashboards created for specific regulatory bodies can help you gather all essential information in one place. These important dashboards can be found in CMS in the Admin Console.
“In the Admin Console we have what is called the regulatory dashboard. Within there you can identify your primary Environment of Care procedures if you’re TJC, or other DNV procedures. Underneath there you have your Elements of Performance,” Kevin presented. “When those are set up in the system, then we assign the PM procedures to those assignments so now we can track every time those procedures are used on a work order and we can track the compliance against those.”
Another key step is moving from physical paper binders to electronic binders.
“We also have the electronic binders, or eBinders, that run those dashboards for you automatically, putting those documents in there directly from the cloud in the right section within CMS,” Kevin pointed out.
Storing documentation in the cloud saves valuable time, and storage space, searching through paper reports and allows all your data to integrate and pull from one place.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity has always been an important concern for HTM professionals, but it is appearing in more headlines than ever. When it comes to your CMMS, it’s important to select a partner that prioritizes your asset data security just as much as your hospital prioritizes the protection of patient data.
When thinking about how to keep your medical equipment from cyberattacks for malware, consider how it connects to your hospital.
“When you’re looking at cybersecurity, you should be identifying the equipment that potentially has risk and is vulnerable to some type of breach of security,” Charles shared. “You should ask, how is my device integrated into the system as a whole?”
Private patient information lives on certain devices, and it is absolutely critical to ensure vulnerable devices are unable to be accessed in order to protect this information, even after decommission of the asset.
For the full conversation and to gain a better understanding of the top trends in HTM headlines, reach out to our team to receive a copy of the webinar recording.