Ask The Expert

CMMS for Clinical Equipment Asset Management

Clinical Assets in the healthcare environment represent a significant expense to any organization; second only to labor costs. Managing these assets and their associated expenses requires a combination of expertise, experience and proven tools. Serving as a multi-vendor service provider for almost 25 years, Philips has worked closely with HTM teams to help take care of the complexities of clinical asset management so patient flow remains on track and clinicians can focus on delivering the best in patient care.

Sat Jun 01 2019By Philips Healthcare

Chris Duffy, Senior Product Manager for Philips InfoView CMMS application discusses the answers to key questions asked about the latest in asset management. Chris will be demonstrating InfoView at the upcoming AAMI Exchange 2019 in Cleveland, OH, June 7-9.


Q: What is clinical asset management?

At a basic level, managing assets begins with an accurate inventory and the ability to track the service history and related cost for each individual unit of equipment. But, more importantly, asset management is about identifying and delivering strategic actions to optimize your clinical asset services and operations.Asset management involves the optimization of both cost and performance. Balancing these two requirements is often a challenge. However, through a clinically focused CMMS, a data-driven approach to clinical asset management provides three core benefits to help healthcare management professionals achieve this seemingly elusive goal, including:

  • Optimizing asset readiness
  • Improving work order/resource management
  • Providing business intelligence for capital planning

 Many organizations still have legacy client-server or hosted CMMS applications that support single work order management for single locations. Today’s CMMS applications are built on leading edge, cloud-based platforms, providing an integrated solution for asset management, service and work order management, preventive and corrective maintenance, and real-time reporting to manage clinical assets from ‘inception to retirement.’ With so much data being captured everyday on thousands of service events, across potentially dozens of locations, HTM departments need to have immediate access to the right level of service data so they can turn data into valuable insights. 


Q: How can a robust CMMS application help an HTM department?

In today’s healthcare environment, you must adapt your business practices to stay relevant and valuable within your organization. HTM departments are constantly looking at ways to optimize their clinical assets, optimize their work teams and optimize their engagement with their organization’s leadership. A robust and scalable CMMS application helps support an HTM department with technology automation, service support and proactive reporting insights to become a strategic partner with their leadership. With the right CMMS solution, the HTM department is clearly seen as the central HUB that provides the operational service support and insights needed to meet an organization’s patient flow and financial performance goals. 


Q: What would you say is the ideal CMMS solution?

Each organization has unique needs. Your CMMS solution needs to be flexible and adaptable to meet those needs. I’ve worked with hundreds of organizations and the key CMMS needs that I am asked about include such features as managing assets within a standard formatting protocol, and providing a centralized repository for tracking and managing all relevant asset information including location, service history and costs. Organizations also want a CMMS that automatically creates work orders for routine preventive maintenance and for unscheduled corrective maintenance work orders are quickly and easily created and routed to the appropriate service engineer. Access to information needs to be immediate, so engineers must have mobile, real-time access to data, enabling them to quickly locate assets, view work orders and tasks, order parts, record work status, materials, labor hours, comments and more. Additionally, organizations are asking the CMMS to support an HTM department’s AEM (Alternative  Equipment Maintenance) plans and integrate with various tracking applications such as RTLS and recall/safety notices. Mandatory requirements from the CMMS are to provide flexible reporting and analytics for audits from the Joint Commission andDet Norske Veritas (DNV), as well as data tracking to support IT security vulnerabilities. Lastly, organizations need their CMMS to track resource proficiency and productivity, and the overall capital planning strategies for their clinical assets over the assets’ lifetime.


Q: How would you judge the differences in CMMS offerings by vendors?

There are many organizations that offer a ‘CMMS’ solution. Some solutions are bare-bones data entry applications that cost a few hundred dollars, while others will offer much more comprehensive enterprise wide solutions and require a five to six figure investment.  

When considering a new CMMS solution here are a few questions to ask based on your business needs: Do I need to just capture and track my current asset data or manage my assets based on standardization and regulatory compliance through national standards, thus driving the highest level of data accuracy possible? Do I need a full IT solution across the entire organization, or focus on improving and supporting the HTM department’s service delivery? Do I need a customizable solution or an out-of-the box solution? What kind of reports and dashboards do I need? What kind of documentation do I need for and from my engineers on service work orders, PM checklists, contract management and Joint Commission compliance? Do I want or need my CMMS to support equipment distribution? Do I want to have my CCMS to be integrated seamlessly into parts ordering? Is mobility and immediate access to the CMMS important? What kind ofbenchmarking against past equipment performance do I need to improving asset readiness? What kind of CMMS features do I need to quickly do risk assessments and remediation as it relates to my cybersecurity efforts? What kind of reports do I need to share with the C-Suite and how often?


Q: Do you have an example of a customer who has used the Philips InfoView CMMS?

One of our customers,ranked by US News and World Report as one of the top 75 best medical schools in primary research and patient care, has over 30,000 assets and made a decision three years ago to switch to InfoView from their legacy CMMS tool developed by an independent service organization. Leveraging the flexibility of the InfoView tool, this customer has utilized InfoView not only for asset management, but also for parts ordering and sourcing. Estimated performance improvements since deploying InfoView include: Using InfoView’s parts sourcing feature and service, parts costs have decreased on average by 23%. Additionally, this customer uses InfoView’s real-time dashboard to display key operational metrics for the biomed team on a large screen monitor. This public display drives accountability and performance transparency. 

Additionally, with InfoView’s online service requests text message dispatch escalation and routing have improved repair response with automated technician workflow by over 15%. InfoView is also used for equipment distribution. By integrating data captured during distribution of movable assets into InfoView the customer has experienced a 30% improved location accuracy as well as improved ability to find recalled devices for remediation. Lastly, through InfoView’s intuitive interface and automated data entry technicians are now spending more time on core job duties, with an estimated 20% boost in job productivity.


Q: You’ll be at the AAMI Exchange June 7-9.  What will you be showing as it relates to Asset Management?

At AMMI Exchange 2019, Philips will showcase the InfoView integrated asset management tool to provide accurate, real-time insights to customers’ key performance indicators.Philips InfoView is available as a stand-alone application for self-sufficient in-house HTM teams, or is paired with Philips Multi-Vendor Customer Service solutions.

Infoview now has over 150 data management features that are designed into our core offering with no ‘custom’ development required. This large out of the box feature set is the result of a robust development strategy that operates in two-week sprints, resulting in new enhancement releases every two weeks. This allows us to be very agile to customer requests, and proactively enhance our features to support customers’ needs.  

Examples of enhanced and improved features include expanded service requests and service event tracking, seamless parts ordering, benchmarking and capital planning, and expanded data analytics. New planned maintenance (PM) and corrective maintenance Guided Editors make it simple and efficient for technicians to document their work, keeping them in front of customers and equipment.  With over 20,000 device models as part of our ‘standard’ data set, pre-loaded PM checklists are available for all devices (either AEM or OEM), provides Joint Commission compliance as it relates to alternatively acceptable and OEM procedures on clinical equipment. We’ve also expanded our reporting on OEM/third-party contracts, ensuring proactive notifications when contracts are expiring, as well as dashboards that provide insights on the effectiveness of contract savings. Lastly, through our online message boards accessible to all InfoView users, we have an active user community to facilitate the connection of users to share information, technical help, and new feature ideas.  

For additional information, visit Philips InfoView.



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