Becoming a digital and paperless workforce is a good target for any organisation. In the medical industry, the efficiency of inspection is a key contributor to facility performance and ensuring that both patients and staff are benefiting from equipment in optimum condition.
Having an extensive a dynamic medical equipment management system in place is a highly effective way of ensuring this. Less time replacing or making sure issues are fixed and more time for doctors to be utilising equipment for patients. Utilising mobile devices for medical facility or medical equipment management is fast becoming the leading way organisations are choosing to keep their business in check. Smartphones and tablets provide numerous features which are particularly useful for medical assets (both locations and instruments), including speech-to-text services, GPS timestamps, the device camera, annotation and automatic corrective action triggering. Visual identification for speedy status verification means technicians can follow up on potential faults faster and ensure if-needed replacements get to a facility as fast as possible. Time is not only saved for the maintenance, but also business reporting and the inspection time itself. The implementation of digital checklists to businesses to replace paper inspection has been estimated to save organisations 1/3 of their inspection time.
Medical asset and medical equipment management also brings benefits in the form of quality assurance and compliance. A large part of any medical organisation is ensuring the strict compliance with industry and governmental regulations and standards. Standards such as ISO13485 or ISO9001 can be directly matched with checklists as reference material for the inspection officer, alongside previous inspection reports, manuals or any other organisational material deemed necessary. A spokesperson from Anaequip Medical said of the implementation of digital checklists: “Going paperless has been a huge success for us. We’ve had great feedback from all our staff about the ease of using the tablets and how we are now all synced together. By linking calendars as well, we all know each other’s location and can respond to call-outs in a much more efficient way.”
