What is Healthcare Asset Management Software?
Healthcare asset management software enables healthcare organisations to get an overview of responsibilities of assets, planned maintenance, service requests, documentation on assets within hospitals, clinics, and service organisations. Asset documentation could be manuals, general information, contracts, and planning of preventative maintenance on personal level, group level and department level.
Asset management software made specifically for healthcare have a greater understanding of the benefits and challenges of managing assets in the healthcare segment. Asset management made for healthcare is aimed to be used by hospitals, healthcare institutions, clinics, home care providers, MedTech manufactures, and service companies.
The main target group of asset management software in healthcare is clinical engineering, IT, radiology, lab, dental, home care, administration such as finance, and many others.
Why is Healthcare Asset Management Software Important?
Compared to other industries, in the healthcare industry it is crucial that all assets are maintained in an excellent condition to ensure patient safety. Especially, high risk and high device class medical assets, such as defibrillators and ventilators, must follow strict maintenance procedures in order to ensure patient safety.
Healthcare asset management software solutions can ensure regulatory compliance at the healthcare organisation. Depending on your location and governing body, there are various compliance that needs to be adhered to. Not adhering to local, national, or international regulatory compliance will not only affect your organisation’s operations and credibility but could also have devastating effects on patient safety.
Some, but not all, healthcare asset management solutions enable compliance with: Global Medical Device Nomenclature (GMDN), European Database on Medical Devices (EUDAMED), European Medical Device Regulation (MDR), Unique Device Identification (UDI), and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
Most healthcare organisations have internal review procedures and may request reports related availability of medical devices, downtime, amount of planned preventive maintenance the coming quarter, amount of unplanned maintenance, and work order turnaround times, only to mention a few. Asset management software made for healthcare can abide by these internal review procedures required by healthcare organisations.
What are the Healthcare Asset Management Software Benefits?
There are many benefits with using healthcare asset management software. The benefits that will have the largest impact can vary based on the needs of the healthcare organisation.
Here are a few benefits that are common across the healthcare segment:
- Improved maintenance by providing accurate and timely information for planning maintenance sessions, allowing for repairs to be carried out in quieter periods.
- Decreased downtime through helpdesk features that provides information directly to clinical engineering.
- Enhanced asset registry to keep track of the entire medical inventory with information related to model, codes, manufacturer, contracts, warranty, finance, and more.
- Maximised asset utilisation with real-time data from IoT sensors combined with historical data from the asset management software. Detecting issues before they come apparent and therefore extending the life cycle of medical devices.
- Complying with regulations and internal review by easily providing reports related to the availability of medical devices, downtime, amount of planned preventive maintenance the coming quarter, and more.
- Ease localisation of medical assets, helping staff to locate medical assets faster. As a result, spending less time tracking down assets and instead get more time with patients.
- Sustain patient safety by ensuring that medical assets are properly maintained according to manufacturer recommendations, and ensuring that critical assets are available when and where they are needed the most.
We have created an entire list of healthcare asset management software benefits that expands upon these mentioned benefits and many others.
What does Healthcare Asset Management Software do?
There are several features in healthcare asset management software that are made to fit medical and organisational needs. All organisations and their needs are unique; therefore, we can only discuss from a general point of view.
Same as all organisations being unique, so are the healthcare asset management software as well. These software may vary in features they provide, future development roadmap, availability for customers to customise the software. Our healthcare asset management software solution made for the healthcare segment has the following features:
- Asset Registry & Management. The most fundamental feature of healthcare asset management software is to contain all medical asset related information: manufacturer, model, class, type, codes, associated costs, location, downtime, documentation, and more that fits the organisation’s needs.
- Work Orders (WO). This is related to asset management as a whole. Work orders, in simple terms, are tasks related to medical devices: description, priority, type of work need, supply need, and assigned personnel.
- Preventive Maintenance (PM). Most medical assets have recurring maintenance scheduled to ensure the device is in a healthy state. The amount of time the recurring maintenance is based on manufacturer recommendations and effects on patient safety.
- BI-Analytics. Enables healthcare organisations to make a data-driven decision basis. Providing reports of medical asset activities through dashboards and email to management, clinical engineering, and others interested.
- Customer Portal. Easing management of customer related activities in healthcare organisations.
- Helpdesk. Centralising helpdesk and providing advanced service request management within and across multiple hospitals or clinics.
- Contract. Managing hundreds of contracts can be challenging for many healthcare organisations.
- Competence. Keep track and document training, certificates, education, and roles for all personnel.
- Rent & Loan. Provides support for renting and loaning out medical equipment to other departments and patients as in the case of home care services.
- Logistics for New Hospitals & Relocation Projects. Supports construction of new hospitals and relocations projects by facilitating planning and implementation of construction and relocation. This will reduce the amount of time critical medical assets remain unavailable.
- Finance. Enables support accounting activities such as recurring invoicing.
- Patient & Logistics. Patient focused logistic management of equipment and consumables.
- Integration. Can be integrated into a wide range of third-party software solutions. Some suppliers even have integrations standardised, ensuring data security, and reducing costs.
Are You Looking for Healthcare Asset Management Software?
If you found this article relevant for your healthcare organisation and seem to need an asset management software solution, feel free to reach out to us. We are happy to discuss your needs to see if we might be a solution for your needs or at least guide you forward. It is entirely free, and we can provide a personalised demo to fit your healthcare environment (also free).
Our asset management solution software is managing more than 15 million medical assets daily in over 400 hospitals. We have more than 23 years of experience in the healthcare segment, and we are continuously developing our solutions to meet current and future needs within the industry.
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