Patient care teams and administrators shape so much of their patients’ experiences when they’re providing care that oftentimes medical equipment can take a back seat. But the selection of equipment throughout a facility plays a direct role in patient outcomes, practitioner efficiency, and the overall success of an organization.
Medical equipment planners can either enhance providers’ noble intentions by adhering to standards, or undermine everyone’s efforts with a haphazard procurement strategy.
Setting equipment standards is relatively straightforward, but consistently enforcing them can be a challenge for many planners. Medical equipment planning software could help you overcome these challenges.
Why Enforcing Medical Equipment Standards Is So Important
You probably have a well developed list of equipment standards your organization needs to follow for every purchase. Unfortunately, these standards are meaningless if you don’t uphold
them. Enforcing equipment standards helps:
- Control Costs - If you align your equipment standards with the offerings of a specific manufacturer or brand, you can leverage your bulk purchases for better pricing.
- Improve Budget Accuracy - Repeatedly ordering the same equipment gives first-hand insight into product specifications, challenges, and lead times, so you can build these nuances into your budget and avoid any surprise overages or unexpected expenses.
- Streamline Maintenance - Standardizing equipment across your entire organization gives maintenance crews less variations to worry about, so they can focus on maintaining standard equipment models and maximize service contract savings.
- Increase Productivity And Quality of Care - Providing practitioners with reliable and uniform equipment helps them work more productively because they don’t have to orient to a wide-array of tools. Creating consistent layouts from room to room also helps clinicians flow more smoothly between appointments.
The Challenges of Enforcing Equipment Standards
Medical equipment planners may have to plan and procure tens of thousands of units every year, so enforcing standards for such a high volume of purchases can be a challenge due to:
- Managing Stakeholder Collaboration And Feedback - Making the best equipment choice requires insight from clinicians, IT experts, facility engineers, and other stakeholders, but collecting and organizing all of this information can be overwhelming and time consuming. Details can get lost under tight deadlines and scattered workflows.
- Standards Visibility - Even if all insight is gathered, organizing and presenting standards in a way that’s clear and easy for everyone to understand creates another challenge.
- Identifying the Best Equipment - In the U.S alone, there are more than 5,000 medical equipment manufacturers. Searching through all of their catalogs for equipment that meets your standards could take more time than you have available.
- Keeping Standards Up To Date - Medical technology is always advancing, and healthcare organizations need to ensure their standards always reflect the latest capabilities. But keeping up with the high volume of new developments every year is a Herculean feat.
Rising to the Challenge of Enforcing Equipment Standards
Revalize is an industry leading software solution that streamlines every aspect of medical equipment planning, from product sourcing, to budgeting, to actual procurement. The platform brings all equipment standards, product specifications, and budget information into a single database that makes it easy to collaborate with stakeholders and optimize decision making. Medical equipment planning is transformed from an overwhelming and inefficient process into a unified workflow that drives value throughout your organization. Especially when it comes to enforcing equipment standards.
Users have access to an integrated medical equipment catalog with more than 75,000 SKUs and 65 critical data points on every product. You can enforce your organization’s equipment standards with ease by simply entering them into the platform and filtering down to products that match your requirements. Users can even build customized room templates with their organizations’ equipment standards to easily communicate them to other stakeholders and executives.
Users have access to an integrated medical equipment catalog with more than 75,000 SKUs and 65 critical data points on every product. You can enforce your organization’s equipment standards with ease by simply entering them into the platform and filtering down to products that match your requirements. Users can even build customized room templates with their organizations’ equipment standards to easily communicate them to other stakeholders and executives.
Learn more in our new ebook, or Schedule a demo with one of our experts.
