What CMMS should be deployed in a medical environment?

Although CMMS (computer-aided maintenance management) software is often intended for industrial environments, each sector or structure actually benefits from it and can, provided the right solution is chosen, optimize the maintenance of its machines. Hospitals and medical organizations have every interest in equipping themselves with such software if they want to face the many challenges that are unique to them.

Why all hospital maintenance needs to be optimized

As in all environments, maintenance plays a key role in the activity of a structure. It therefore remains dependent on dedicated teams, who can have very varied tasks depending on the medical environment in which they work. Medical laboratories, hospitals or even nursing homes are all players in the sector who have an interest in equipping themselves with a CMMS to meet the many challenges they encounter.

To optimize the maintenance of your equipment and machines, you have no choice but to equip yourself with the right software, which allows you to save time and gather all the information relating to inspections and interventions carried out in one and the same place. If it is still too often the case that maintenance professionals, regardless of their sector of activity, manage their tasks on Excel files, they will quickly be able to notice the disadvantages of this system.

Forced to travel as part of their interventions, and in addition to wasting time, they cannot directly enter information on the tasks they are doing into the system: they are more likely to ignore them unintentionally or to lack clarity in their reports. This will make it more difficult for their colleagues to resume the checks and operations carried out and this will increase the risk of making mistakes, or even performing duplicate tasks or equipment orders.

The tasks will also be poorly executed due to the lack of documentation that is quickly accessible. Needless to say, without a tool designed to adapt to maintenance in a medical or hospital environment, it is very difficult for the various departments to communicate and coordination is non-existent.

Managing your resources in your CMMS

It is essential that maintenance personnel keep an eye on the numerous equipment that the structure is equipped with at all times and that they can ensure that it is properly maintained, which is impossible without the right maintenance management software.

Register all of your equipment

The main advantage of a maintenance management solution is the possibility of registering all of your equipment and medical equipment. It turns out that medical teams have many assets to manage, and that they must organize themselves to receive and install new equipment if they want to ensure optimal monitoring. They need to be maintained at regular intervals, so the management of their maintenance must be monitored very closely.

A CMMS will allow you to meet this requirement by registering all your equipment and all the equipment: adding a photo, location in the structure, detailed sheet... All elements that will then help you to intervene quickly. Thanks to this quickly accessible data, you can increase the availability of equipment, which is essential in medical or hospital environments.

Ensure compliance with procedures

In the medical environment, maintenance also makes it possible to ensure constant compliance with the various procedures, for example, according to the recommendations formulated by the manufacturers. The medical or hospital sector is rather sensitive, and it is essential to guarantee the safety of machine users as well as patients. In maintenance management software, you record all manufacturer files and compliance documents and can consult them to ensure their compliance. Some next-gen solutions also allow you to create checklists, useful for teams who need to ensure that these procedures are followed.

Use your software to keep track of all intervention and verification reports and, more generally, of all actions carried out on the equipment. Since teams must submit to strict technical procedures and controls, it is essential to maintain a comprehensive history of all interventions. Thus, each operator creates tasks and activities in the tool to feed this history and allow better visibility of maintenance department activities.

Such a solution finally meets an essential need of medical institutions: that of having in-house maintenance professionals who are both flexible and excellent technicians.

Maintenance as a guarantee of safety

Again, it is essential that maintenance teams can ensure the safety, especially electrical, of users, patients and equipment. To do this, they will have to monitor electrical circuits using various technologies. Whether they opt for the installation of sensors on equipment or for techniques such as infrared thermography, maintenance management software will also be essential.

Mobility Work allows operators and technicians to be autonomous: creation of tasks, maintenance plans, notifications for each new activity...

Mobility Work CMMS, a SaaS mobile platform available on PC, mobile and tablet, for example, allows you to connect sensors to the software. These measure various indicators and alert you if the set thresholds are exceeded through a notification system. At the slightest anomaly or as soon as a malfunction is suspected, the teams in charge of maintenance are therefore able to intervene on the equipment concerned in a few seconds.

You can also create counters in your software to, for example, monitor the energy consumption of machines, or other data, according to your needs. Users thus gain independence as soon as they have to intervene on a machine and are more flexible. All the data they might need is at their fingertips and they can react more quickly to ensure equipment and materials are available.

Why is next-generation CMMS better suited to hospital maintenance than traditional software?

Structures are often tempted to turn to conventional and reputable software, which nevertheless prove to be real gas factories for users. They will be the first to say it: this software is counterintuitive, impossible to learn, extremely expensive and requires hours of training.

On the other hand, the new generation solutions are a total break with these outdated systems : very easy and pleasant to use, they are much more easily adopted by teams. The Mobility Work software is part of this line since it is community-based and does not require any training.

The guarantee of better interconnectivity between services

While the personnel responsible for maintaining the assets of the structure must most often be multi-skilled, they must also interact with different departments and maintain a certain interconnectivity between them.

Mobility Work users access product catalogs put forward on the platform by the suppliers and manufacturers themselves. Not only can the Purchasing function therefore monitor the maintenance needs of the teams, but it can also access consumables and other products directly in the tool thanks to this feature (thanks to the free profiles). Users can consult the various product sheets, view manufacturers and suppliers and contact them.

Mobility Work offers various profiles, some of which are free (service provider or intervention requester) adapted to services other than maintenance. Purchasing can therefore benefit from good visibility on maintenance activities and better anticipate reported needs: as a result, orders can be placed more quickly and procurement times and maintenance costs are therefore reduced.

This interconnectivity, made possible by next-generation maintenance management solutions, facilitates collaboration between the various departments, in particular that of biomedical engineering, which is particularly in demand. The latter, in charge of controlling biological systems or even developing devices for diagnosing or treating patients, is largely concerned with maintenance. An adapted solution will thus make it possible to meet this pressing need.

Get effective and reliable follow-up of your interventions

Clearly, equipping the teams in charge of maintaining the various equipment with a solution will facilitate their interventions, increase the availability of machines, guarantee the safety of healthcare personnel and patients and ensure smooth maintenance.

From a human point of view, communication between maintenance personnel and other departments will be streamlined. The risk of human error is also considerably reduced since the various stakeholders keep track of all the activities carried out and access all the compliance documents they need, which ensures them to carry out reliable maintenance monitoring.

In terms of maintenance therefore, teams are in a position to better manage intervention planning and access all the intervention indicators and reports they need directly in the tool. The advantage of solutions such as Mobility is the Dashboard feature, an analytical tool that compiles all the data entered into the tool by users and presents it in the form of graphs to help you monitor your performance indicators.

Find an analytics tool in Mobility Work to analyze all your maintenance data and adapt your strategy

You will find the equipment that required the most hours of intervention, the most carried out operations, the most used keywords... All data that helps you to take a step back from your operations and identify potential difficulties: the tool allows you to rely on this data to make strategic decisions (type of maintenance to be implemented, whether or not to replace certain machines, etc.).