The patient’s equipment should be maintained regularly to have a highly functioning equipment for quality care. Clinical engineers are faced with a variety of tasks including equipment recall, preventive maintenance and maintenance correction. The manual process of locating equipment throughout the hospital campuses is laborious. Often, when the equipment is finally located, the clinical engineer cannot collect the piece of equipment because it is in use or is programmed for use.
Preventive maintenance is also regulated by regulatory agencies that audit hospital equipment maintenance records periodically. The SmartX HUB solution records and controls in an integrated way to trace, the status of each maintenance request, and the costs and hours involved in each clinical engineering action.
Thousands of medical devices spread across many hospital buildings make clinical engineers strive to achieve this preventive maintenance goal for regulatory compliance. Other tasks, such as medical device recalls or repairs, require immediate removal of service equipment since they can affect patient safety and have liability implications.
Equipment Maintenance is part of the Smartx Hub solution for Hospitals, and uses extensive access to the network of connected gateways to provide a broad set of applications throughout the hospital. The solution automates the current manual processes that most hospitals have to locate equipment that requires maintenance.
The location of each tagged equipment is displayed on a map of hospital areas in the SmartX HUB solution. SmartX HUB solution maps include a complete view of the building to allow a quick view of asset distribution. The status of the equipment can be determined by various means, to understand if the equipment is available for maintenance. For example, hospital staff can use alert functions to physicians to indicate that equipment requires maintenance. SmartX technology tracks when equipment enters or leaves an area, or even the facility, and alerts staff to reduce lost and stolen equipment. The alert may also indicate that the equipment has been placed in an area where it is now available for collection. Alerts include emails, web pages, text messages, and other forms, such as integration into a third-party maintenance management system.
Hospital staff can report on the SmartX HUB solution to understand the location and status of equipment that requires preventative maintenance. The solution stores all historical data and includes on-demand and analytical reporting tools. The reports present graphical and tabular views that can be printed or exported to Excel, PDF, or web (HTML) formats. Reports include asset location and status history, current location, utilization, and inventory.
