Four factors hospitals should understand
Ensuring patient safety and uninterrupted care while maintaining economic efficiency is a core responsibility of hospital operations. Medical technology therefore needs to be reliable, durable, and available when required.
There are four key factors that significantly influence the overall uptime of medical equipment.
- Repair frequency
Repeated technical issues and breakdowns directly impact hospital operations and efficiency. Increased repair volume leads to longer downtime and requires more frequent interventions. Additionally, unplanned repairs often result in unexpected costs, placing further strain on hospital budgets.
Expert insight from Duane Hawkins:
Adopting a proactive maintenance strategy is one of the most effective ways to address this challenge. A service agreement should have a structured planned preventative maintenance schedule, this ensures the device is appropriately maintained and also enables potential issues with the device to be identified and resolved prior to failure, avoiding a repair intervention.
By using this approach, the interval between failures increases, allowing equipment to remain clinically operational for extended periods and providing higher levels of uptime.
- Repair duration
The length of time a device is unavailable for use due to a repair event has a direct impact on its overall uptime. Repair duration is influenced by several factors, including the severity of the issue reported, spare parts availability and supply chain efficiency, logistics, and the accessibility and expertise of service technicians responding to the repair.
Expert insight from Duane Hawkins:
As mentioned, adopting a proactive maintenance strategy will mitigate the potential for a repair / breakdown, both in terms of frequency and severity of the issue. Additionally, hospitals benefit from working with the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) as their service partner due to experience of the devices and their intended use.
As an example, Getinge have exclusive access to spare parts, tooling and trained service technicians, this enables Getinge to routinely review the demand of spare parts, and geographic locations of devices to ensure maximized coverage of engineers to support those devices in a timely manner.
- User training
Studies suggest that a common cause of equipment downtime is due to insufficient training of clinical users or in-hour biomedical technicians, reporting that up to 70% of repairs are ‘avoidable’.
Expert insight from Duane Hawkins:
A key consideration when procuring medical devices is formal training packages, for both clinical and non-clinical teams to ensure formal, recorded training is available, and allows for re-certification.
All Original Equipment Manufacturers are required to ensure records of those who have been trained are accurately maintained, this is also important from a hospital perspective to ensure compliance.
As an example, Getinge will provide user training throughout the life cycle of a device, ensuring the safe and effective operation of the devices is maintained (and therefore reduces repairs caused by user error).
- Service quality
A key part of determining and selecting an appropriate service partner is assessing the overall quality of their service provision. This includes ensuring the use of genuine, new spare parts with full traceability throughout the supply chain, service documentation, correct tooling, and ongoing training of service technicians to confirm and assess competence.
Expert insight from Duane Hawkins:
An essential requirement from service providers is ensuring that full support is available, aligned with the Original Equipment Manufacturers’ specifications. This includes planned preventative maintenance and repairs performed according to official service and repair manuals, and the appropriate documentation and tooling is used throughout the process. Additionally, ensuring service technicians are appropriately trained on the device, with regular re-certification and assessment to maintain competence and compliance.
This approach ensures that devices are fully supported and have access to the latest software revisions. If support requirements change, devices will benefit from these efficiencies, resulting in increased uptime.
Conclusion
There are several key considerations that impact equipment uptime: repair frequency, repair duration, user training, and quality of service provision. Optimizing these factors minimizes downtime, enables greater control over unexpected costs from unplanned maintenance, and improves total cost of ownership throughout the equipment's lifetime.