Better coordinated, data-driven medical device management can have a big impact on health system operations. George Reed, clinical engineering director at WakeMed Health & Hospitals, recently spoke with Healthcare Innovation about system-wide improvements in clinical asset performance his North Carolina-based organization is seeing. 

Reed has been in clinical engineering for over 40 years, and says it has become much more complex from the days when the maintenance of devices was documented on paper. Today, documentation is digital and includes lots of network information.

In the past, management of these assets from multiple vendors has been fragmented. Reed described his role as figuring out how to systemize and standardize the enterprise workflows to provide better information to leadership to help with decision-making across their three hospitals. 

Raleigh, N.C.-based WakeMed recently signed a multi-year partnership with software and services company PartsSource to unify asset visibility, service orchestration, and supply chain intelligence into a single layer across more than 38,000 devices.

WakeMed has helped with co-development and early deployment of a solution called Asset Uptime, a multi-vendor, multi-site platform that unifies asset telemetry, service data, and supply chain data to support real-time operational visibility and predictive insights.

Reed gave an example from imaging. “If a call comes in and a device is hard down, you're able to track that and look at it on a dashboard, so that you know exactly what's going on with that asset at any given time, and see it on your phone on tablet. That’s priceless,” he said. In the new process, not only is the technician notified that a device is down, but as they are in route to that service event, the algorithm from the software platform is looking at the service keys and historical data and determining based on this event, these are the parts you need, and they are already ordered. “So when that tech gets on that site, they go in and assess and confirm. They can then turn to leadership and say this is what's wrong with it, and parts have already been ordered," he said. 

By integrating remote device performance monitoring, service data, and procurement workflows, WakeMed can now identify patterns of failure and performance variation across its fleet.

“PartsSource is really our logistics partner,” Reed said. “From a clinical engineering perspective, that software in the background really allowed us to start to look at how we were spending our dollars. We have all the data in front of us now, and can look at how we can mitigate having to spend two and a half hours on ordering a part, for instance,” he said. “We have dropped that down to less than seven minutes now. It's like shopping on Amazon for our team. We're calculating our labor savings on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis to show leadership.”

The new system even connects sensors in the environment looking at the cool water, hot water, or room temperature. “If we start to see that the coolant is not where it needs to be, we get an immediate notification, because a room too hot or too cold can have a direct impact on a CT or an MRI,” he said. “Now we are getting notified of environmental issues that we can immediately ping facilities about. We can be proactive to mitigate that downtime.”

Reed stressed the financial impact to hospital operations of this type of improvement. “Let’s say a CT generates $12,000 a day,” he said. “What we are looking to be benchmarked against is how often we mitigate the length of downtime so that we have more uptime and are generating more revenue out of those assets. The better we are at predicting our failures, and getting the right part in, we could be mitigating a 24-hour service event to just six hours. That really helps the operational business of a hospital.”

In fact, WakeMed figures the partnership already has led to $7 million in cumulative net savings, representing approximately 31% sustained annual savings, and a $900,000 reduction in service cost variability, which previously fluctuated between $5 million and $6 million a year.