Benefits of Outsourcing Biomedical Equipment Repair Services

A hotly debated topic with pros and cons of course, outsourcing can have a significant impact on a healthcare facility’s bottom line. As an industry leading provider of medical equipment repair solutions for healthcare facilities, today we talk about some of the advantages of outsourcing your biomedical equipment repair services. Many of the advantages discussed here can also apply to other departments within your healthcare facility. Also what may seem simply an asset management solution can lay the foundation for a comprehensive medical equipment service strategy that can help your healthcare organization address your facility’s long-term goals.

Advantages of Outsourcing Your Healthcare Facility’s Biomed Equipment Repair Services

1. Reduced Operating Costs

One of the apparent benefits of outsourcing your repair services relates to reduced operating expenses that an experienced vendor brings. Outsourcing can eliminate the need to hire in-house resources; therefore labor costs and operational costs can be minimized to a great extent. You no longer need to invest in and train highly specialized biomedical technicians. Your newly hired vendor will handle all resourcing needs by tapping into their pool of highly skilled, trained and certified technicians. Your facility can pay for expert service on an as needed basis. You no longer need to invest in recruiting and training expensive resources for your business. Outsourcing can cut back drastically on expensive infrastructure requirements like customer service call centers and technical helpdesks which can result in heavy investments to companies. Keep your costs low by outsourcing these functions.

By investing in an outsourced program you can decrease the costs of managing clinical assets, while improving operations. An important aspect to this is being able to find hidden costs, saving through standardization, and using a strategic approach to servicing your medical equipment. Many times when reviewing an in-house clinical engineering program there is a multitude of contracts to support all the equipment from various vendors. From an administrative viewpoint, the volume of resources required for tracking and servicing equipment is difficult to manage.

• Many times maintenance expenses are broken up across individual departments and multiple GL accounts.
• Duplication of contract coverage and associated expenses can many times be missed due to the complexity of the accounting of these expenses.
• Inaccurate inventory list and the associated maintenance expenses may not be accurately recorded.

An independent firm that specializes in asset management will be able to easily oversee the enormous scope of work involved with a comprehensive medical equipment maintenance program. This certainly includes overseeing the sheer volume of contracts associated with managing, maintaining, and eventually repairing all of the sophisticated medical equipment housed in your medical facility. Outsourcing your medical equipment servicing solutions brings with it a single source of talent to handle the management and ultimate maintenance of all your medial equipment. By leveraging a 3rd party’s clinical engineering expertise and/or support, hospitals benefit from greater equipment performance predictability, control and cost savings. Large providers of clinical engineering solutions have the resources to support specialists for high-end modalities across their customer base, whereas an individual hospital or health system typically cannot. Reduced material costs resulting from economies of scale and lower negotiated prices, and the ability to keep up with newer technology can help healthcare organizations gain an edge on their competition.

2. Quality

As medical devices continue to grow more and more sophisticated with every passing day, having skilled biomed service technicians becomes even more paramount. Clinical engineering technicians who are current on the latest training and are available at a moment’s notice are a vital part to ensuring all equipment is precisely maintained, diagnosed with speed, and repaired correctly the first time ultimately reducing equipment downtime.

Outsourcing your medical equipment maintenance program offers immediate access to the highest level technician for even the most sophisticated devices. Often times, technicians have device-specific training directly from the OEM, they are equipped with the latest service manuals, test fixtures and diagnostic tools, and have access to ongoing training for today’s most advanced medical equipment. It can be cost-prohibitive to expect an in-house program to compete with the staffing, training and education needed to handle a large assortment of very sophisticated equipment located throughout a hospital. An in-house technician may be able to do a sufficient job to a certain degree but often times they lack the remote capabilities, advanced training, and access to an increasingly skilled hierarchy of technicians. It is unrealistic to expect an in-house program to possess the scope of training needed to successfully implement a modern day clinical engineering program that is becoming increasingly complicated by big data and often times compliance driven. An outsourced program offers technicians better training opportunities allowing them to become experts across a myriad of medical devices ensuring that the hospital or medical center has access to technicians with expertise on any number of medical devices at a moment’s notice.

3. Capital Planning

To continue to grow and in order to remain a viable solution for your patients, a hospital or healthcare facility must be able to manage its assets effectively and efficiently. Having an accurate inventory is an absolute essential piece to any hospital’s asset management program whether it is an in-house program or it is an outsourced program. Hospitals typically set purchasing priorities by comparing current inventory against department requests. Unfortunately, if asset inventories are inaccurate – and for many hospitals they are – precise capital planning can be virtually impossible.

Today’s outsourced clinical engineering programs often times have the ability to track inventory in real-time. Having a robust CMMS inventory system affords the facility to ability to collect valuable quantifiable data on such things as equipment age and condition, number of service calls and uptime percentages, failure rate, preventative maintenance scheduling and benchmark this data on a national level. However, only by leveraging the breadth of knowledge from an outsourced provider with hundreds of other accounts can you get access to critical information such as; benchmarks of device reliability and stability, comparisons of device volumes required by similar sized hospitals, and comparisons regarding equipment approaching end-of-life. The results from all the data collection capabilities is more successful capital planning and greater efficiencies in managing the always changing needs of the hospital.

Outsourcing your medical equipment repair services to a qualified third party can provide all of the above mentioned benefits, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.