Medical Equipment Management Software (MEMS)

Medical equipment management software streamlines equipment maintenance and oversight. Enabling easy to access asset registry. Ensuring risk management, compliance, and patient safety. Commonly used by, but not limited to, clinical engineering, IT, radiology, lab, dental, home care.

Asset Registry & Management

Medical equipment management software (MEMS) is ultimately a tool to streamline management of healthcare assets. Compared to various other industries, in the healthcare industry it is crucial that all medical equipment, assets, and devices is maintained in an excellent condition to ensure patient safety.

Especially, high risk and high device class medical equipment, such as defibrillators and ventilators, must follow strict maintenance. It is critical that these tools are in top condition and available to physicians, nurses, and other hospital staff.

Regulatory Compliance of Medical Devices

Medical equipment management software plays an important role managing preventive maintenance of all medical equipment, reducing the potential risk of equipment failure, and providing analytics.

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).

Internal Review in Healthcare Organisations

Many healthcare organisations require internal review 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. This information will be used in decision making and investment processes, while also helping clinical engineering to balance and quantify part of their workload.

Benefits of Medical Equipment Management Solutions

Beyond ensuring compliance to regulations and internal requirements, management of medical equipment has great benefits for the healthcare organisations:

1. Enables hospital staff, such as clinical engineers and maintenance teams, to streamline medical equipment management from oxygen-concentrators to CT scanners.
2. A comprehensive asset registry that enables easy access to authorised users.
3. Assign requests, work orders, preventive maintenance to available resources, and more.
4. Scheduling planned preventative maintenance for medical equipment.
5. Enabling clinical and administrative staff to easily log and track maintenance requests on medical devices through help desk functionality.
6. Some provide an integrated mobile app making information accessible to you when on- and off-site.
7. A few suppliers also provide real time analytical insights. Create and share your own analysis. Ability to get reports emailed directly to you with the information you need.
8. Can be integrated into a wide range of third-party software solutions. Some suppliers even have integrations standardised, ensuring data security, and reducing costs. For example, Siemens teamplay fleet and Medusa integrated their platforms to support healthcare regions in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

However, all benefits will not come by themselves. Medical equipment management software must be implemented properly in the healthcare organisation to ensure their procedures can be managed in the system. The healthcare organisation and supplier should maintain a continuous communication to discuss new feature requests and maintain good relations.

MEMS Areas

Medical equipment management solutions may vary in some degrees and the best solution to fit a specific organisation may differ depending on their requirements. Therefore, it is recommended that the organisation and the supplier have a dialogue to discuss the potentials, limitations, and roadmap of the solution.

There are some areas healthcare organisations should consider:

• Asset Management
• Customer Portal
• Helpdesk
• Contract
• Competence
• Equipment Library
• Construction and relocation projects
• Finance
• Patient and logistics
• Integration services
• BI-Analytics

Deployment

Many healthcare organisations require the capability to access their medical equipment across multiple facilities and departments. Medical equipment management software with cloud-based deployment can make it seamless for healthcare organisations to track maintenance requests across large distances. At the same time, a medical equipment management solution will provide clinical engineers improved asset visibility compared to an Excel spreadsheet.

A few medical equipment management solutions also extend accessibility to mobile applications, making it easy to access while on the go. Some solutions can be deployed locally at the facility, allowing for offline capabilities that will allow hospital staff to document information while disconnected from the internet. 

Enterprise Asset Management, CMMS & Medical Equipment Management Software

There are numerous terms for similar systems relating to medical equipment management software. Enterprise asset management (EAM) and computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) are the most searched according to Google Trends.

Enterprise asset management is the same as medical equipment management software. EAM and CMMS are similar, however an EAM has all the features of a CMMS, while a CMMS does not have all the features of an EAM.

Medusa EAM for Healthcare

Medusa is an efficient enterprise asset management (EAM) solution made for healthcare that encircles medical equipment management software and computerized maintenance management systems. The solution supports all processes in the lifecycle of a medical and IT-device. Medusa can be delivered both as a SaaS and on-premise solution. Accessible on both web browser and mobile phone.

Summary

MEMS is ultimately a tool to streamline management of healthcare assets, to meet regulatory compliance of medical devices, and useful when conducting internal reviews. The benefits are vast and will increase as the healthcare organisation grows larger. A MEMS solution has many different areas that are related to medical devices, everything from asset management to finance and analytics.

How could a MEMS solution fit into your healthcare organisation?