When it comes to a health system’s ability to deliver connected care, a lot is riding on BioMed and clinical engineering teams. After all, they need to be able to answer without hesitation:
How many of each device do they have?
Where is each device located, and what’s its status?
Is the hospital prepared for a surge in device demand?
Has the latest recall been handled?
What’s the hospital’s exposure to the latest OS vulnerability?
When should they schedule maintenance?
How quickly can they apply a patch?
These answers are hard to come by because of a lack of real-time visibility into critical connected device details. As a result, BioMed and clinical engineering personnel spend upwards of 40% of their time on low-level tasks associated with tracking information down and validating it.
They need a dynamic, data-rich system of record that can give them all the device details and insights they need to make lifecycle management decisions. This insight is what the Medigate Clinical Device Efficiency (CDE) module does. It integrates Medigate’s CORE visibility engine with a health provider’s Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) to give BioMed and clinical engineering teams the inventory details and insights on the networked assets essential to the delivery of connected health.
CDE transforms the CMMS into a “live” data management system that provides complete coverage of all the IoT and IoMT devices on the network. Orchestrating the data can dramatically increase the value of the CMMS’s inventories and system-initiated workflows. The CMMS can also deliver the same data to improve the performance of other non-native ecosystem workflows.
Improved Capital Planning
CDE helps establish a link between production, capacity, and demand, so health systems can significantly improve their connected asset capital planning and spend management. For example, data about product utilization and maintenance needs can quickly improve internal procurement planning processes, supplier negotiations, and contract compliance.
Asset Management for Demand-Driven Allocations
CDE can unlock all sorts of operational value by providing a real-time view of asset availability (i.e., capacity) and utilization (i.e., demand). For instance, InfoSec and BioMed can share an understanding of asset location, status, security posture, and utilization to better plan and orchestrate activities like recall management, reordering, and restocking. CDE also helps to:
Enable continuous inventory reinstatement of lost or missing equipment
Validate current inventory levels to reduce rental premiums
Accelerate device restaging by allowing location and utilization statuses to inform rules aimed at lowering idle time
Improve the management of Periodic Automatic Replenishment (PAR) levels to reflect current inventory requirements better
Operational Efficiency
CDE helps ensure the correct information is readily available in a context relevant to everyone so Biomed can use it to drive efficiencies across the health system’s operations. It helps:
Improve device lifecycle management – from planning and acquisition to retirement and disposal
Prolong the useful life of assets by shifting maintenance interventions from elapsed time to actual utilization
Save time and money by coordinating Healthcare Technology Management (HTM) and IT decision-making around device management and security and eliminate time-consuming, outdated, manual processes so staff can tackle more challenging pursuits.
Attract, develop, and retain talent with more meaningful activities that drive value to the enterprise
Ensure every medical device is accounted for at all times to comply with increasingly stringent regulatory requirements. Whether based on changing guidance from the FDA, directives from the Joint Commission, or provisions in the recently passed HIPAA Safe Harbor Law, the incentives for health systems to maintain accurate, secure inventories have never been more apparent.
Risk Abatement
The creation of a single source of truth helps everyone better understand enterprise risks, so that appropriate teams can:
Add risk factors to supplier selection criteria and rental/leasing decisions, allowing known vulnerabilities and risk-based performance metrics to be considered as part of the supplier evaluation process
Instantly correlate vulnerabilities (CVEs and manufacturer advisories) to potentially impacted devices to help prioritize remediation workflows
Tailor risk assessment frameworks by device class and existing security postures and then simulate the impacts of compensating controls to maximize effectiveness
Maintain an audit trail for compliance, forensics, and reporting purposes
Enforce security policies that enable - and do not constrain - the delivery of connected care
These are just a few examples of how CDE's data and insights can help BioMed and clinical engineering teams improve the speed and effectiveness of their asset lifecycle management decisions. To learn more or see CDE in action, please visit medgate.io/cde.
