The Best Way To Simplify Medical Device Maintenance

Proper maintenance also impacts equipment longevity, patient safety and the efficiency of your medical facility. Managing these responsibilities is no easy task, often leaving you to juggle third-party relationships and complicated rules.

Fortunately, medical device maintenance can become a benefit for your facility instead of a challenge. The key is to choose the right partner — here’s why.

Key Considerations in Medical Device Maintenance

For many providers, equipment maintenance management is somewhat of a necessary evil — one that’s become so commonplace that you may overlook its inherent value. Let’s consider key elements of medical equipment maintenance to uncover why it’s worth improving:

Provider Benefits

Medical devices are part of nearly everything you do, which means their reliability has the potential to impact your facility. Regular maintenance can:

• Maximize efficiency: Eliminate time wasted on repeat tests or rushed repair service, enabling healthcare workers to focus on quick, effective patient care.
• Minimize downtime: Proper maintenance means your medical equipment will be ready whenever your patients are, reducing costly and frustrating delays.
• Improve accuracy: Well-maintained medical devices may present less risk of providing inaccurate results, ensuring your teams have the information they need to make informed decisions.
• Access better data: When equipment operates at peak performance, you get a more complete, reliable view of resource allocation, patient data, facility efficiency and more.

Patient Benefits

While patients may never know about the maintenance necessary to keep medical devices functional, they certainly appreciate the outcomes. Equipment that works correctly the first time and provides accurate information can help build trust, improve health literacy and support effective patient/provider communication. Better yet, well-maintained devices may help make patient safety a given, meaning patients may be more likely to feel at ease during tests or other procedures.

Compliance Requirements

Impacted by everything from cybersecurity and data privacy to third-party relationships and changing regulations, medical equipment compliance is more complicated — and important — than ever. Navigating this area often involves several ISO standards, FDA requirements and more.

Fortunately, effective maintenance management helps you check all the right boxes without adding complexity to an already tangled regulatory landscape. This makes it possible to help build compliance into your device strategy from the ground up, which empowers your teams to avoid pitfalls and create the necessary documentation without having to create new processes every time.

Maintenance Quality

When it comes to maintenance, quality can be a significant factor in determining your return on investment (ROI). Remember, high-quality maintenance keeps your devices working better for longer. That means less time and money wasted on medical equipment repair or replacement — which, in turn, means more time and money available for patient care.

Cost Control

Maintenance and repair costs are a significant portion of your overall device costs, making them a crucial element in business management for providers like you. The reality is that maintenance can be either a financial problem or a cost-saving opportunity depending on how you approach it — one more reason this is a vital area of focus and improvement in any medical facility.

Why Medical Device Maintenance Is Slowing You Down

Now that you’ve seen why medical device maintenance is worth perfecting, it’s time to consider what might be standing in your way.

The truth is that it’s often your current processes slowing you down. Maybe you’re relying on a familiar approach because changes seem complicated, expensive and risky — or maybe you’re basing maintenance tasks on outdated resource data and patient expectations (both of which have changed dramatically following the pandemic). Regardless of the underlying reasons, your processes are likely leaving you struggling in areas like these:

Navigating Equipment Agreements

Your procurement strategy may include renting or buying equipment — sometimes both. That means you’ll have different agreements in terms of maintenance responsibilities and costs, likely making your medical equipment management strategies fragmentary and disjointed. This can lead to unnecessary costs, potential quality issues, added downtime and more.

Allocating Resources

Managing an equipment portfolio is a huge endeavor, from procurement to maintenance to documentation. You may have trouble knowing where to allocate resources that are already stretched thin, creating complications at every stage of a device’s lifecycle — and that can have cascading effects all the way down to patient experience.

Managing Priorities

Equipment management and maintenance are complicated enough on their own, but the reality of healthcare is that you’ll have additional issues to juggle — including staffing shortages, compliance requirements, third-party partner scheduling conflicts and more. This can make it difficult to put your focus toward the issues that most directly impact your facility and patients.

Accessing Legal and Compliance Expertise

Quality care hinges on equipment maintained to the highest ISO standards. You need easy access to maintenance service, but you also need it to come with legal and compliance expertise that protects your business — and that can often be a delicate balance. Without this kind of support, you may be left scrambling to resolve potential non-compliance issues or fill internal knowledge gaps.

Tracking Key Maintenance Activity

Which devices are due for preventive maintenance and when? Which third-party partners are responsible for each element of repair? How do you access, track and learn from all of this data while creating the necessary compliance documentation? Most providers struggle to answer these questions, proving that maintenance is as difficult to track on paper as it is to perform.

How To Simplify Medical Device Maintenance in One Step

You could look at all of those challenges above and try to work out individual solutions — or you could address them all at once with a single step: choosing the right partner.

That’s because the right partner acts as a single source to simplify all of your operations, from supply ordering to medical device management. This third party should provide the necessary equipment and offer critical services to extend its usable lifespan, maintain compliance and address any issues. The idea is to eliminate the need to manage multiple relationships, including with manufacturers and other third parties that may be performing medical device repair — all while saving time, money and resources.

McKesson Biomedical Solutions^TM: Your Single Source for Success

At McKesson, our goal is to help you focus on caring for your patients, not your medical devices. Our equipment services and repair solutions eliminate complexity and streamline some of your most important responsibilities, allowing you to prioritize the issues most critical to resource allocation and patient care.

Here’s what makes it all possible:

Reliability

With 99.8% order accuracy and a 98% fill rate, we pride ourselves on being there when you need us. But we don’t just deliver medical equipment and other supplies; we’re also experts in proactive maintenance, corrective maintenance and all the other support necessary to keep your devices functioning at peak capacity. You’ll also have real-time visibility into the status and location of your devices during service, giving you more control and less hassle.

Cost Efficiency

It’s true that regular maintenance helps prevent the costs of downtime, emergency fixes, replacements and more — but with McKesson, that’s only the beginning of your savings. You’ll also:

• Cut back on overall maintenance spending thanks to streamlined device management processes.
• Reduce the risk of capital investment.
• Save time, money and resources by letting us handle repair and service history documentation.
• Minimize downtime with access to specialist teams for troubleshooting and support.

Improved Outcomes

We lay the groundwork so you can serve your patients more efficiently, effectively and confidently. Our service helps you improve device utilization, meaning you’ll have what you need to improve patient outcomes without increasing costs. Because we’re your single source for equipment, support and more, you’ll have a more consistent partner experience — and that means more consistent care, too.

Improve Medical Device Maintenance (and So Much More)

Medical device maintenance can be a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity for better outcomes at lower costs. All you have to do is identify an effective way to address all of your considerations at once — and for many providers, the answer is to simplify operations by choosing a single partner.

At McKesson Medical-Surgical, we’re proud to be that single partner. We’re here to support all of your equipment needs, from procurement to maintenance documentation, and we’re flexible enough to accommodate whatever works for your facility.

Want to learn more about how McKesson Biomedical Solutions™ can help with your device service and rentals? Contact Us!