Why Enterprise Asset Management is Moving to the IT Department
Equipment breakdowns occur regularly in most hospitals. But the maintenance of these assets is often divided among multiple stakeholders within a hospital.
Biomedical engineers may be responsible for keeping medical devices running, while IT staff has domain authority over most software and hardware. Responsibility for other assets, ranging from refrigerators to televisions in waiting rooms, may fall to facilities managers.
Each group may use its own methods for ticket tracking and record keeping. The result, says Ben Person, a Senior Director for Solution Consulting at Nuvolo, is a hodge-podge of systems within different departments for tracking assets and ensuring they are properly maintained.
Person recently outlined some of the asset management challenges hospitals face in a webinar for CHIME (College of Healthcare Information Management Executives). The event, available on-demand for CHIME members, was hosted by Healthcare IT Leaders.
Enterprise Asset Management in the Cloud
Health system mergers and the spread of care delivery outside of the traditional walls of the hospital, increase the need for comprehensive enterprise asset management (EAM) solutions. Nuvolo is a cloud-based EAM solution that provides a single system of record to manage assets across departments, facilities, business units and geographic locations, enabling greater transparency for stakeholders with improved reporting and compliance.
Real dollars are at risk, says Person, when asset management is spread across disparate or antiquated systems (e.g. hand-written maintenance records). When an MRI machine goes down and patients have to be rescheduled, revenue is lost. Having a centralized system to view in real-time when the issue was reported and when it will be fixed, is as important for the CFO as it is for clinicians and patient schedulers.
Easily accessible maintenance records are also critical for compliance purposes, says Person. Asset tracking and reporting is a common requirement in Joint Commission audits.
Nuvolo is built on the ServiceNow platform, an ITSM solution familiar to many IT departments and CIOs. That familiarity is a major reason CIOs are taking a lead in implementing enterprise asset management solutions that help bridge the gap across multiple departments and stakeholders.
Healthcare IT Leaders is a preferred Nuvolo services partner. To learn more about how your hospital might benefit from Enterprise Asset Management, contact us today.