In a healthcare facility, the equipment cannot fail, so the maintenance work is a 24/7 endeavor. And since the services are highly complex, the management of this continual maintenance work is critical. Mistakes are not allowed as they are costly, but fortunately avoidable. With the help of a well-designed CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System), hospitals can gain complete control over all of their maintenance management activities. Such a system gives managers real-time visibility and insight into the equipment’s condition to know if a failure is about to happen. They can take preventive action before a glitch turns into a severe problem.
What is a CMMS and How Can it be beneficial in Healthcare Facilities?
A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is a central hub for an organization’s maintenance operation. It facilitates maintenance operations and enables the management to make informed decisions, leading to significant improvements in the availability and utilization of physical equipment. In healthcare facilities, a CMMS is supposed to cover different areas, such as medical equipment, food storage equipment, HVAC systems, plumbing, elevators, etc. To ensure medical equipment’s safety and operating, two types of maintenance programs are often employed with proven results in increasing the uptime of assets and utility of the healthcare facility: Preventive Maintenance and Predictive Maintenance.
Preventive Maintenance
Timely preventive maintenance will maximize the equipment uptime, reliability, and availability. The question is, how do you precisely know when to perform a PM? The answer is through condition-based maintenance. Sensors attached to equipment gather real-time operational data feeding the CMMS cloud application. The CMMS uses the data and automatically generates work orders, and notifies the impeding PM’s maintenance personnel. Another essential feature of a CMMS is its ability to track the equipment’s working time. Many systems only track by odometer or by the due date. The ideal CMMS for healthcare facilities should also track usage hours and the number of times the asset was used. This is ideal for the equipment that requires calibration after usage, such as phototherapy devices.
Predictive Maintenance
The CMMS should be able to predict when equipment should be shut down to prevent a failure. The CMMS utilizes smart sensors to collect real-time equipment condition, usage, environment, and performance for predictive analysis. A predictive maintenance algorithm helps determine the condition of in-service equipment to predict when maintenance should be performed. The system sends alerts to the right personnel at the right time, so corrective action can be taken before the equipment breaks down.
Benefits of CMMS Solution for Healthcare
In healthcare, the benefits of a CMMS are numerous and indeed strong enough to justify its utilization. It allows managers to schedule regular inspections of the medical and other equipment to ensure their proper functioning. Preventive, predictive, and corrective maintenance programs can easily be planed and tracked.
The system also provides a unified storage platform for equipment records that can be easily accessed. One of the most critical aspects of the CMMS is its Spare Parts Inventory Management. The frequently updated inventory of the necessary maintenance materials and repair parts eliminates potential supply shortages that can disrupt schedules.
The system’s inventory management capabilities are vital for controlling restricted access to critical medicines, vaccines, and health products. The system allows managers to restrict access based on roles or responsibilities, so you can always track down who has had access to what. This is very important in a hospital with valuable or dangerous devices and medications, not only in theft or misuse but also in keeping the illegally acquired drug off the streets.
Dominate Smart Maintenance Management (CMMS)
Dominate Smart Maintenance Management is a cloud-based CMMS solution, providing robust maintenance management to healthcare providers. It helps you better manage your facility and equipment. You can easily control your maintenance tasks and ensure that the equipment is operating reliably and efficiently enough to guarantee patient care and patient satisfaction.
System Features
- Gain insights into potential equipment failures
- Optimize asset lifecycles
- Have accurate data to hold technicians accountable for the maintenance work performed
- Access tasks directly from mobile devices with no need for central computers
- Advanced dashboard features provide maintenance teams with visualized layouts of the healthcare facility
- Track the location of crucial equipment and knowledge about the work performed on it so far
- Manage incoming maintenance requests via Work Request Portal
- Track and manage maintenance costs
- Have the necessary asset information at your disposal: serial numbers, meter readings, warranty…
- Arrange tasks in order of urgency
- Leverage the reporting and business intelligence features
- analyze key performance indicators (KPIs)
- And a lot more…
Without a fully-integrated CMMS solution, the risks extend beyond maintenance itself. If the maintenance work is not efficiently managed, not only employee productivity will decrease, but there will be an increased risk of liability and negative patient experience. Dominate CMMS helps you to streamline your maintenance operations and meet the various government regulations and maintenance standards.
