Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) for hospitals enables a systematic approach to medical asset management that a hospital department or group is responsible for. Ensuring reliability, compliance, and patient safety in hospitals.
What is CMMS for Hospitals?
A computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) for hospitals is used to manage medical assets and equipment. CMMS enables hospitals to get an overview of responsibilities of assets, planned maintenance, service requests, documentation on assets within hospitals, clinics, and service organisations.
CMMS made for hospitals enables a systematic approach to governance over medical assets that a department or group is responsible for, throughout the entire medical asset lifecycle. The governance of hospital asset management is a systematic process starting from the procurement of the medical asset, operating, maintaining, upgrading, and disposing of the asset, in the most cost-effective manner possible.
Asset management in hospitals includes everything from ventilation, air-conditioning, refrigerators, coolers; to CT-scanners, defibrillators, oxygen concentrators, beds, and wheelchairs. There are many other possible assets to mention. It is not uncommon for medium and large hospitals to have more than 3000 distinct types of assets within their facility.
Why is CMMS Made for Hospitals Important?
The ability to manage more than 3000 distinct types of assets within a hospital facility is a major challenge. A hospital often has multiple units of the same asset, such as having multiple defibrillators of the same type through the entire facility.
As a result, the total number of assets a medium to large sized hospital will have at least 5-10 times the number of distinct types of assets. Keeping track of all these assets and the maintenance needed requires well-functioning governance and processes.
Hospital CMMS Supports Compliance in Healthcare
Depending on your location there are various compliance that needs to be followed such as: Global medical device nomenclature (GMDN), European database on medical devices (EUDAMED), European medical device regulation (MDR), and unique device identification (UDI).
7 Key Benefits of CMMS Made for Hospitals
There are multiple benefits of using a CMMS solution for hospitals. Here are a few key benefits:
1. Streamline Asset Management
The most important benefit of having a CMMS made for hospitals is that helps keep track of all medical equipment, inventory, and assets. You can build a detailed asset record containing data such as model, codes, manufacturer, contract, warranty, finance and more. This enables hospital staff, such as clinical engineers and maintenance teams, to streamline medical equipment management from oxygen-concentrators to CT scanners.
2. Automatic Preventive Maintenance Scheduling
Preventive maintenance can be scheduled automatically according to contracts or internal policies. This allows you to get an overview of all upcoming preventive maintenance jobs and the estimated time required.
Together with BI-analytic reports and dashboards, you can easily see where busier and quieter periods occur. This enables you to balance preventive maintenance between busy and quiet period or increase resources to manage the tough periods.
3. Ease Risk Management
Compared to various other industries, in the healthcare industry it is crucial that all medical equipment, assets, and devices are maintained in an excellent condition to ensure patient safety. High risk and high device class medical equipment, such as defibrillators and ventilators, must follow strict maintenance procedures.
A CMMS system will support risk management operations with providing comprehensive data, reporting, and key performance indicators (KPI).
4. Intuitive Work Order Management with Mobile Access
Allows you to access information without returning to a computer, through search or QR scanning. Enables medical technicians to get the documentation they need and update work orders. Especially useful for organizations with multiple facilities, and for home care.
5. Easily Quantify Workloads
Dashboards and reports can be generated by some CMMS solutions, such as Medusa, which will help policymakers and easily quantify workloads for the clinical engineering team. In the case of Medusa, the software solution also enables clinical engineers to easily create their own analysis and reports with drag and drop functionality.
6. Maximise Medical Asset Utilisation
Manufacturers are beginning to include IoT sensors into their devices. Real-time data together with historical data from a CMMS could help extend the life cycle of medical devices. The maximising medical asset utilisation benefit, in short, means extending the usability and availability, while also improving reliability.
7. Beneficial to Sustained Overall Patient Safety
Ultimately, the goal of healthcare is to provide exceptional care for all patients. Ensure you can maintain your patient safety through properly maintained medical assets. At the same time, so you can make sure that the medical assets are available when it is needed.
3 Things to Look for in Hospital CMMS
1. Is the vendor continuously improving the CMMS?
It is important that the CMMS software solution matches your current needs. However, as your healthcare organisation develops, so will your needs. Therefore, it is important that you find a vendor that is continuously driving innovation and are ready for your future needs.
2. Does the vendor provide support?
Having access to technical support for a CMMS solution is one of the most valuable services a vendor can offer. As a customer, it is important for you to understand how the provider handles support and if any fees are involved. Some CMMS software solution providers have no support, and others provide support but with a long response time.
3. What are the deployment options available?
You will need to consider if you want a CMMS that will be deployed locally (on-premise) or cloud. It is also worth considering if you want the hospital CMMS software to be accessible on your mobile phone.
What Functionality Does Hospital CMMS Have?
There are several features of hospital CMMS software that are made to fit medical and organizational needs. Here are some areas that healthcare organizations and hospitals should consider:
- Asset management. The most basic feature of hospital CMMS is to contain all the medical asset-related information: manufacturer, model, class, type, codes, associated costs, location, downtime, documentation and more that suit the organization’s needs.
- Work order management. Work orders are, simply put, data related to medical devices: description, priority, type of work requirement, delivery requirement, and assigned personnel. You can read more about work order management in healthcare here.
- Preventive maintenance. Most medical assets have recurring schedules to ensure the device is in a healthy state. Preventive maintenance also helps extend the life of medical equipment, saving money and resources in the long run.
- Customer portal. Simplify the management of customer-related activities in healthcare organizations.
- Customer service. Centralized helpdesk and provide advanced service request management.
- Analytics. Enable healthcare organizations to make a data-driven decision base such as balancing tough and quiet periods.
Each CMMS software solution has different features, but only a few are focused on the healthcare segment. Medusa is a solution made for healthcare that encircles computerized maintenance management systems and has additional functionality to meet the needs in healthcare organisation. The solution supports all processes in the lifecycle of a medical and IT-device.
Summary
Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) for hospitals enables a systematic approach to medical asset management that a hospital department or group is responsible for. Ensuring reliability, compliance, and patient safety in hospitals.
CMMS in hospitals plays a significant role in managing preventive maintenance of all assets, reducing the potential risk of the asset breaking down and has several additional benefits. In order to gain many of these benefits the CMMS must match the current and future needs of the hospital.
We have created a comprehensive article of CMMS made for healthcare which expands the topics in this article but also dives into the implementation phases of CMMS, the difference between CMMS and EAM, and how a Healthcare CMMS could fit into hospitals.
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