Revolutionizing Healthcare Maintenance: The Power of CMMS

Maintenance is an essential asset for energy-intensive industries. According to reports from Natural Resources Canada, hospitals generate higher energy intensity than all other activities in the commercial and institutional sector, with the exception of food and beverage industries. This is why the shift to Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) in this sector is necessary.

CMMS allows healthcare establishments to effectively address today’s energy constraints. But beyond this aspect, it is a tool that offers establishments a complete maintenance management solution. A CMMS not only guarantees the reliability, safety and compliance of buildings, but also ensures the follow-up and monitoring of medical devices within the framework of the improvement of health services.

What challenges does CMMS represent for the healthcare industry?

Energy is one of the main challenges of the 21st century and the CMMS is a solution that is gaining momentum in all issues related to it. Whether it is energy infrastructure or energy efficiency, CMMS affects both aspects. Optimizing the maintenance and improving the performance of energy-intensive equipment through CMMS is a practice that is gradually becoming an obligation for healthcare establishments.

Medical equipment represents a significant investment for healthcare institutions and the cost of its maintenance is high. Additionally, advances in technology are driving rapid and constant evolution of medical devices, and healthcare facilities must keep pace. It is a strictly controlled market, subject to rigorous standards and directives, and the question of their maintenance has become a real challenge for the sector because it has a direct impact on the quality and safety of healthcare, while impacting their carbon footprint. Indeed, today we must not only guarantee the quality and safety of services, but also think about preserving the environment through our activities.

What is a CMMS software ?

CMMS software is a computerized maintenance management software that centralizes maintenance information to facilitate the management of associated activities and operations. It optimizes the use and availability of equipment and other assets.

The software is aimed at different industry sectors such as manufacturing, oil and gas production, power generation, construction, transportation and other industries where physical infrastructure is essential, such as health facilities. This tool assists the maintenance services in their daily tasks thanks to new technologies (mobility and traceability applications). The tool provides real-time status reports to help management make more informed decisions for all maintenance activities while optimizing the utilization and availability of physical equipment (medical devices), machinery, communications, and infrastructure.

CMMS software solutions generally include management modules for:

Preventive maintenance
Predictive maintenance
Management of labor and equipment
Workflow management
Scheduling and planning
Inventory control
Purchase
Budgeting

Recommended for you :

Discover the best Apps for the health industry

The challenges facing healthcare operations

In recent years, healthcare organizations are facing an increasing degree of challenges. Besides the energy consumption constraints, hospitals are also confronted with labor shortage, an aging technician workforce and a poor equipment management system.

Labor shortage

In addition to dealing with a growing demand for care and services in Canada, due to the aging of the population and the pandemic, institutions must deal with the issues of scarcity and retention of manpower, which results in an overload and exhaustion of the workforce in place. According to data from the “Survey on Health Care Workers’ Experiences During the Pandemic” survey, 17.9% of the remaining active workers in the industry wanted to leave their current job in the next three years; this percentage increases to 24.4% when looking only at nursing staff statistics.

Aging workforce of biomedical technicians

Most healthcare institutions face the problem of an aging workforce of biomedical technicians. Soon there won't be enough technicians to service and maintain their growing fleet of critical biomedical equipment. Moreover, there aren't enough young people entering this line of work.

Poor healthcare equipment management systems

Health establishments operate with a management system that is not adapted to the needs of the industry, they are facing:

Limited real-time visibility into equipment inventory, work order history, and asset tracking.
Low utilization rate of some equipments
Lack of accurate and reliable information and data to support equipment selection and alternative equipment maintenance programs.
Renting or acquiring unnecessary equipment due to short-term equipment shortages
Broken workflow systems resulting in poor work prioritization.
Poor optimal asset management decisions due to failure to understand the true cost of owning medical equipment.
Poor coordination of equipment usage, leading to delays and affecting patient safety.
Frequent reactive rather than preventive maintenance and service requests

Recommended for you :

Discover the best Apps for the health industry

The benefits of using a dedicated CMMS in the healthcare industry

CMMS is becoming an essential ally in the health sector. This tool can help achieve energy efficiency. The U.S. Department of Energy Operations and Maintenance reports that preventive maintenance can result in energy savings of up to 18%. It has also dedicated functions that help organizations achieve effective maintenance management, and ensure buildings, medical devices and equipment reliability and compliance.

Here are the main advantages of the CMMS tool in this industry:

Improved intervention management:

Healthcare infrastructure and equipment created for the well-being of patients and residents must be functional every time they are used. Because when we talk about the proper functioning of medical equipment and building infrastructure, errors are unacceptable and the stakes are vital. For instance, if an air treatment device fails, hospital operations are at risk.

To carry out curative maintenance (repairs that are carried out when the equipment breaks down) of the health infrastructures, a CMMS system offers dedicated features such as an automated and streamline service request workflows for the intervention module..

For preventive maintenance, the tool will provide an automated preventive maintenance module and alternative equipment maintenance (AEM) to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. The CMMS can automatically generate digital work orders thanks to a preventive maintenance program configured.

Traceability and monitoring of interventions:

All the interventions carried out on the equipment are traced on the CMMS tool. This function keeps electronic records of all the interventions, to comply with Materiovigilance (Medical Device vigilance) requirements on biomedical devices and to comply with the regulatory obligations weighing on these devices, allowing the organization to keep digital maintenance records of all equipment.

Equipment inventory and stock management

CMMS ensures the referencing of products while offering complete and real-time visibility of the equipment and infrastructure status. The tool will guarantee the availability of equipment and other supplies and consumables to ensure continuous quality of service.

This function improves knowledge of the actual status of equipment, to identify, classify, inventory the equipment and save the information in a centralized database. The staff will be able to define a maintenance policy for the management of stocks of spare parts and consumables (lamps, probes, masks, filters, etc.)

The Canadian government has initiatives to improve the quality of healthcare in Canada. There are some real major recommendations for the policy maker with this regard in the Digital Health Care Market Study. Digital health care products and services should be among the priorities of the sector to provide the population with access to modern establishments offering quality health care and social services. The implementation of a CMMS system fits perfectly into this approach because effective management of maintenance is essential to guarantee the reliability and compliance of buildings, and in particular of medical devices.