ISOs - EffectiveServicing ofImaging Equipment

The promise of advanced imaging technology contrasts withday-to-day patient care challenges in an increasingly complex, costly, and resource-constrained environment. Successful service organizations, including hospital operations, understand the delicate balance that cost, quality, and delivery play in consistently driving better outcomes.Clinicians balance this equation at the patient level. Supply chain works behind the scenes to balance this equation. Finally, service providers bring this discussion full circle, introducing technology toreduce service costs while delivering higher quality service.

For healthcare providers, service delivery is part of the organization’s fabric. In-house imaging service teamsarepart of the hospital by its very nature.Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent service organizations (ISOs), like Crothall Healthcare, earn their way into a hospital’scultureby delivering flexibility, communication, and tailored solutions focusing on positive patient outcomes.

Thisisa foundation for successfully controlling service costs without negativelyimpacting quality. In my experience working for large OEMs, we described the need for flexibility as “needing to teach an elephant to dance.”Alternatively, the best ISOs develop service delivery plans by identifying the customer’s needs and designing a service plan around the desired outcome.

If you’rean in-housesolutionreliant on OEMs, consider establishing a contingency plan with a reputable ISO in advance. If the OEM cannot provide timely service, the ISO relationship establishedwill help prevent excess downtime and a significant revenue loss. Look for an ISOwith robust maintenance standards that meet or exceed OEM requirements, while significantly reducing costs.

Complete Visibility into Imaging Equipment Inventory

A successful imaging service program begins with maintaining an accurate inventory and understanding the location and state of every imaging asset in the hospital or health system, then developing a service delivery plan based on the unique equipment. The inventory is the foundation for moving forward, ensuring safe andeffective medical equipment, developingideal staffing, and establishing theskill set needed to maintain the highest uptime.The goal is to have an up-to-date record of all assets, reflecting the current status at any given moment.

“A successful imaging service program begins with maintaining an accurate inventory and understanding the location and state of every imaging asset in the hospital or health system, then developing a service delivery plan based on the unique equipment.”

Assessing an equipment inventory can help identify areas that maybenefit from standardization. Standardization has the potential to simplify employee training, minimize errors, and reduce maintenance costs and the number of service contracts.

Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) Saves Money

Skilled team members are a large part of the operating budget for healthcare organizations. Effective workforce management starts with appropriate staffing levels.

CMMS software helps accurately estimate labor hours for preventive maintenance, ensuring staffing levels match the workload whileminimizing overtime costs. This labor analysis can determine when adding staff or creating surge capacity with overtime is more efficient.

CMMS Data Helps Organizations Make Effective Replace-or-repair Decisions

Having a comprehensive maintenance management tool tracks not only the age of the equipment but repair history, uptime, and many other metrics. Itspowerful analytics supportdecisions such as when it’scost-effective to replace vs repair an asset. Using one platform to house all the device information connects each of your facilities, giving complete inventory visibility and providing equipment priority replacement guidance and justification so informed decision-making can begin.

Hospitals must track equipment throughout its lifecycle.As programs mature, continually data mine to find additional opportunities to impact asset uptime and reliability. Considering the sheernumber of assets in ahospital,a comprehensive CMMScaptures a wealth of data on each device. This data provides a complete picture of equipment performance and cost. By analyzing this data, managers can make informed decisions that reduce maintenance costs and enhance the radiology service program's productivity,  effectiveness, andperformance.

Whether Your Service Program is Primarily In-house or Outsourced

A successful program requires effort to design, implement, and maintain. If your program completes most of the service using in-house engineers, the in-house option can be lower cost.But, if the program relies on frequent calls to OEMs and other providers to complete service events, costs can escalate quickly to the point that the facility may payconsiderably more due to additional time and material costs. 

Best-in-classindependent service organizations invest in ISO13485:2016-certified quality processes, training programs, and reliable parts supply chains that use OEM-approved parts.ISOsare silent partnersfor OEMs sincethey provide direct parts repair services andservice resources.ISOs make the same parts, repairs, and service delivery available at a lower cost.Another critical difference is flexibility; OEMs may require their service teams to replace large components, such as an entire workstation computer.While this makes sense internally to the OEM, the resultant parts backorders and time-to-repair can be excessive. ISOs share a common perspective with their healthcare partners: deliver cost savings and reduce downtime.ISO engineers troubleshoot that same workstation and replaceonly the defective component, a less costly and more efficient repair.

Summary

A simple equipment and service cost approach is a good starting point for evaluating a newer technology or an existing portfolio of assets.Equipment lifecycles of 10 years are typical.Taking a broader, multi-year view of cost when evaluating strategies is imperative.The cost view is likely enough to narrow alternatives across ISO, in-house, and OEM service strategies.A complete view focuses on one of these strategies while incorporating elements of the other two.