The benefits of outsourcing your medical care.
Reduced running costs
One of the benefits of outsourcing medical equipment repair services is the reduction in operating expenses experienced by an experienced provider. Outsourcing can eliminate the need to hire internal resources; therefore, labor and operating costs can be greatly minimized. You no longer need to invest and train highly specialized biomedical specialists. Your newly hired provider will handle all resource requirements using highly qualified, trained and certified specialists. Your facility can pay for expert services as needed. You no longer need to invest in the recruitment and training of expensive resources for your business. Outsourcing can dramatically reduce costly infrastructure requirements, such as customer service centers and technical support services, which can lead to heavy investment in a company. Save your costs by outsourcing these features.
By investing in an outsourcing program, you can reduce the cost of managing clinical assets while improving operations. An important aspect of this is the ability to find hidden costs, save through standardization and use a strategic approach to the maintenance of your medical equipment. Many times when reviewing our own clinical engineering program, there are many contracts to support all equipment from different suppliers. From an administrative point of view, it is difficult to cope with the amount of resources needed to track and maintain equipment.
• In many cases, maintenance costs are shared between individual departments and multiple GL accounts.
• Multiple duplication of contract coverage and related costs may be overlooked due to the difficulty of accounting for these costs.
• Inaccurate inventory list and associated maintenance costs may not be accurately recorded
An independent asset management firm can easily overcome the intensive work associated with a comprehensive medical equipment maintenance program. This, of course, includes monitoring the volume of contracts related to the management, maintenance and periodic repair of all sophisticated medical equipment placed in your medical facility. Outsourcing medical equipment maintenance solutions brings with you the only source of talent for managing and maximizing service to all of your medial equipment. Using expertise and / or support in the field of clinical engineering of a third party, hospitals benefit from predictability, control, and savings in equipment costs. Large providers of clinical engineering solutions have the resources to support specialists for high-quality modalities across the entire client base, while a separate hospital or health care system usually cannot. Reduced material costs associated with economies of scale and low prices for negotiations, as well as the ability to keep pace with new technologies can help healthcare organizations gain an edge in their competition.
Qualitative
As medical devices continue to grow increasingly sophisticated every day, the availability of qualified biomedical technicians becomes even more important. Clinical engineering techniques that are up to date with the latest workouts and are available instantly are an important part of ensuring rigorous maintenance of all equipment, diagnosing speed and correcting for the first time, which extremely reduces equipment downtime.
The outsourcing of a medical equipment service program offers immediate access to the highest level technical specialist for even the most complex devices. Often, technicians have special training directly from OEMs, they are equipped with the latest service manuals, test instruments and diagnostic tools, and also have access to ongoing training on modern medical equipment today. It can be costly to expect an internal program to compete with the staff, training and education necessary to handle a large assortment of very sophisticated equipment located through the hospital. An internal technician can, to a certain extent, do enough work, but often when they lack remote capabilities, advanced training, and access to an increasingly qualified hierarchy of technicians. It is unrealistic to expect that the internal program will have the scope of training necessary for the successful implementation of a modern clinical engineering program, which is becoming increasingly difficult due to big data and often with the observance of requirements. An outsourced program offers technicians the best learning opportunities that enable them to become experts on a variety of medical devices, ensuring that a hospital or medical center can access technical specialists who have experience with any number of medical devices in an instant.
Capital planning
In order to continue to grow and in order to remain a viable solution for your patients, the hospital must be able to effectively and efficiently manage your assets. Having an accurate inventory is an absolute integral part of any hospital management program, if it is an internal program or it is an outside program. Hospitals typically set purchasing priorities by comparing current stocks with department requests. Unfortunately, if an asset inventory is inaccurate — and for many hospitals they are — accurate capital planning can be almost impossible.
Today’s computer art programs that use outsourcing often have the ability to track inventory in real time. Having a reliable CMMS inventory system provides an opportunity to collect valuable quantitative data on such things as the age and condition of equipment, the number of service calls and the percentage of uptime, the frequency of failures, preventive maintenance planning and national data comparison. However, only by using the breadth of knowledge from an external supplier with hundreds of other accounts, you can access important information such as; benchmarks for device reliability and stability, comparing the volumes of devices required by hospitals of this size, and comparing equipment approaching the end of its life. The result of all data collection capabilities is more successful capital planning and better management of the ever-changing needs of the hospital.
Outsourcing medical equipment repair services to qualified third parties can provide all of the above benefits, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. To find out how you can begin to positively influence the lower part of your hospital by implementing a clinical engineering program that is constantly working efficiently, call us today, 800-736-8257. Visit the website http://www.modmedsys.com
