From the August 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
One consequence of equipment failures is erosion of the staff’s morale and their ability to deliver optimum care. In a way, this is no different from owning a vehicle that cannot be relied upon. We do not want our clinicians and physicians to be frustrated while at work. They are highly educated professionals who need to perform at the top of their class. To do that, they need to have the right equipment available at the right time to deliver the necessary level of care.
Furthermore, in a health care environment that is replete with consumer options, patient confidence and satisfaction are paramount. Patients who experience a delay in care or a referral to another care provider because of an equipment failure may never return to our network. No patient wants to be denied appropriate care due to loss of uptime in a device important to his or her treatment and evaluation. For a person entering through the ER, a diversion to a competitor means the loss of all the other services that would have come along with an admission, and we may never see that patient again.
In the case of more routine care, we want to avoid disruptions that are patient-facing, and these include unplanned delays caused by equipment downtime. In such cases, most likely the patients have already fasted and otherwise prepared for their exams, and they have taken off work to be there. Now we face inconveniencing them again because of something we likely could have prevented. Avoiding those situations is part of the value of proactive monitoring. We may not always avoid an adverse event, but we significantly increase the probability of doing so.
Another benefit of remote monitoring is the collection and compilation of device data into reports that have value for our clinical engineering teams, as well as for organization leadership. On the maintenance side, we can gain insights to how the units are performing and whether there are errors that can be mitigated with simple software adjustments or a reset of a device. We also get more sophisticated information in the form of device utilization and workflow reports. We can use those in our business reviews with manufacturers to make sure we are optimizing the devices’ performance and using them to their fullest capacity.
The benefits of proactive monitoring accrue not just to device users, but to manufacturers as well. The service helps them protect their brand, ensure that their equipment is performing optimally and gather performance information they can use in design and engineering of new products and versions.
