While the frenzy to procure ventilators has subsided, and fatality rates in intensive care have decreased using basic treatments, it is still important to recognize the role of medical equipment in the pandemic response. Ventilators, infusion pumps, and patient monitors provide continue to be critical to the response. In general, imagine where healthcare systems would be without modern infusion pumps, anesthesia machines, MRI machines, x-ray systems, ultrasound machines, and patient monitors.
Medical equipment is critical to modern healthcare today. In the future, medical equipment will be even more critical. Medical equipment is increasingly connected to hospital networks, and data from devices can be integrated with electronic health records, tied to clinical outcomes, aggregated and analyzed to further improve patient health beyond what we know is possible today.
Despite the criticality of medical equipment in promoting a healthy population, the data that flows in and out of asset management systems is often unreliable and incomplete. With reliable and accessible medical equipment data as a foundation, healthcare providers can build improved capabilities for managing investment in medical equipment.
Reliable Data
Medical equipment data has some inherent problems, which can include:
Device Names
The medical device industry is an extremely fragmented industry with a long history of mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, re-brandings and resellers. As a result, the same medical device models may have 20+ different legitimate names. Differences in how to refer to devices (e.g., brand name vs. model number) are also part of the cause of this issue. Finally, there are just differences in how hospitals enter data in free text fields (e.g., misspellings). Within a single hospital system, it is common to have 4 or 5 different ways of referring to the same medical device in some cases. This makes it difficult to know how many of a specific model you have in inventory. Even to a well-informed medical professional, different ways of referring to the same device can be confusing.
Device Categories
Standardizing categories is an art, not a science. The lowest levels of the popular GMDN and ECRI official nomenclatures can be so granular that you can have almost as many categories as models. At a certain point, categorization is not valuable anymore, and mapping to these formal nomenclatures is not repeatable and consistently accurate.
Purchase Price
On average, data suggest that 67% of a hospital's equipment recorded in an asset management system does not have a purchase price recorded. Often, what is entered is not reliably inputted.
Useful Life
Many hospitals attempt to map devices to the American Hospital Association (AHA), which publishes standard useful lives for specific categories. However, mapping to AHA yields the same repeatability issues and inconsistencies as mapping to other standard nomenclatures.
Cleaning up the medical equipment data does not sound like an exciting challenge, but it is foundational to other interesting opportunities.
Accessible Data
Another problem associated with medical equipment data is that little data is typically available in the public realm. The FDA and GUDID are obvious starting points, but the GUDID is often incomplete, and the FDA's searchability is antiquated. Most hospitals subscribe to paid services or their GPO to get data about medical devices when needed. However, only a select few individuals in the organization tend to have awareness and access to the premium paid services that offer medical equipment information. Even then, this information is not always available on-demand and at the administrator's fingertips. In-house data is sometimes available, though this data is usually hidden or buried in obscure back-office systems.
There are also several extended attributes of medical equipment that can be more easily accessible if tied into a single view:
- RFID Location
- Ownership
- Utilization
- Operating System & Security Vulnerabilities
- Service Costs
- Instructions for Use
Few, if any, healthcare institutions have all of these data attributes bundled together in one spot and easily accessible to hospital administrators. What if this data was more accessible?
Optimizing Processes Using Medical Equipment Data
Ultimately, data reliability and accessibility can drive many noteworthy improvements in how critical medical equipment is managed. Benefits can extend to Supply Chain, Finance, Clinicians, Patient Safety, Value-Based Program Managers, Information Technology, and Biomedical Engineers.
Supply Chain
The Supply Chain group is an excellent example to start with. Haggling with vendors for a better price is not going to cut it anymore. To get to the next level of equipment cost reduction, Supply Chain needs to be more strategic, clinically integrated and savvy about how a hospital runs. To do this, they need to understand the lay of the land, and the best way to do that is with accessible medical equipment data and insights at their fingertips.
Supply Chain professionals need insights to tell them:
- What devices are in use today
- The age of the devices
- If the devices are overutilized or underutilized
- Which models are failing or perilously close to failure
Supply Chain employees need to understand to what degree their institution adheres to standards versus giving in the Physician Preference Item requests, how much do new models in the market vary in cost, and most importantly, and how safe and reliable are these different models so that they can have meaningful dialogue with clinicians. Until Supply Chain is armed with better data, they will continue to struggle in the battle to reign in medical equipment costs.
Finance
Finance is another excellent example of a stakeholder who can improve their processes with reliable and accessible medical equipment data. Confidently knowing how much money is spent on medical equipment is key to managing expenditures. Forecasting spend also a pain point as coordination across hundreds of lead clinicians is a daunting and error-prone process. Having a valid starting point could drastically cut the time spent on mundane capital planning processes while enabling a more efficient allocation of funds.
Clinicians and Patient Safety
Clinicians, Patient Safety, and Value-Based Program Managers can also benefit from having access to medical equipment data. As mentioned before, device usage in the future will be tied to EHR records and anonymously shared/aggregated to get better metrics on the real patient value provided by the medical equipment.
This is a part of the FDA's UDI roadmap and something to watch in the coming years as hospitals put a premium on value-based care. Imagine knowing what device is best for any given situation, which devices have the most recorded adverse events or what devices led to the most favorable outcomes. This is the future, and it is attainable.
Information Technology
Information Technology is also a stakeholder to consider when understanding the value of reliable data. Information Technology cannot manage security and network capacity without having a valid clean inventory of medical equipment that is on their network.
Biomedical Engineering
Last but not least, the Biomedical Engineering team can use clean and reliable medical equipment data to benchmark their cost-of-service ratios against industry standards and analyze data on specific models to optimize maintenance procedures.
Getting Started with Reliable and Accessible Data
Medical equipment is critical to healthcare. Reliable medical equipment data is not just for scheduling preventative maintenance and fixing failures. Making this data accessible to other hospital administrators is foundational to improving healthcare outcomes.
How do you get started? The best place to start is by measuring the reliability of your medical equipment data. Explore how to obtain a free data cleaning report card from Accruent.