A hospital’s visible operation is about its patients and its doctors and other care-giving staff. But behind a smooth healthcare service, equally crucial is break-free running of plethora of medical equipment. Breakdown of a single equipment can severely impact hospital’s schedule and therefore operational cost.

To appreciate this better, imagine a patient, scheduled for a non-trivial medical intervention, arrives the hospital. Typically the staff needs 30 minutes to make the patient ready. The doctor arrives 20 minutes before the scheduled slot and asks his team to check the readiness of the instruments. The team while checking found a critical instrument faulty. Administrative team now have to replace the equipment but back-office finds that standby equipment has missed service window and is out of service contract now.

How can the hospital owner avoid such costly oversight?

Solution 1:

An asset and service inventory that is always updated, can help the hospital manager avoid such surprises.

1. Back office can maintain a service schedule and contract documents for all assets online.

2. Hospital management can review it in its operational meeting every week and ensure that no equipment misses the service schedule and no impending service contract renewal go unchecked.

But this can add a lot of book keeping overhead on the team and management. How can we make it painless for the team?

Solution 2:

Use a tool like INDTRAC service reminder.

INDTRAC App lets you add you reminder for every aspect related to service or contract renewal. All one needs is add the details of service date, periodicity (monthly, yearly, half-yearly etc..) of every asset service date and every contract. The App will start sending daily reminders to the administrative team days in advance for every service and contract date so that you do not miss any of them.

Interesting thing is this reminder service can be used independent of indoor tracking service.

That means you do not need BLE (Blutooth Low Energy) or RFID to use this service. All that is needed, is to download the INDTRAC QR App and start using it to manage all assets and service reminders.

Additional Benefits

Medcity News has compiled few important data that can help a hospital owner to decide why this is important.

According to them,

• The average medical service contract took 3-4 months to activate, with greater than 75% of contracts (relatively) low dollar.
• 63% of the contracts had different prices for the exact same model.
• Variability ranged from 40% to 60% in contract costs on the same asset and identical entitlements.

References : Why healthcare needs a new model for equipment service

With the App-driven approach, all the service and contract data would be digitally available and analyzable at any time from one’s phone. That would enable centralised review of all service contracts. Centralised planning and negotiations in advance for service contracts can drastically reduce the variability and cost surprises for the hospital management.