Medical Equipment Database Software

What is Medical Equipment Database Software?

Medical equipment database software is specialised software enabling a systematic approach to medical equipment management that a hospital department, clinic, or laboratory is responsible for. Ensuring effectiveness, reliability, compliance, and patient safety in the healthcare segment. It is a central repository of all medical equipment-related information, such as equipment specifications, purchase and installation dates, maintenance and repair history, and user manuals.

Medical Equipment Database Software helps healthcare providers to keep track of their equipment, manage their maintenance schedules, and ensure compliance with industry regulations. It also helps in identifying equipment that needs to be replaced or upgraded. Medical equipment database software is a critical tool that enables healthcare providers to manage their equipment efficiently and effectively.

Why is Medical Equipment Database Software Important?

Medical equipment database software enables the healthcare organisation to streamline medical equipment management, maintenance management, and equipment tracking. It plays a significant role in managing preventive maintenance of all equipment and assets, reducing the potential risk of the equipment breaking down. This leads to easy management of preventive maintenance and reducing risk.

Managing more than 3000 distinct types of equipment in a hospital facility is a major challenge, with multiple units of the same equipment present throughout the facility. This can result in a large number of equipment, making it essential to have well-functioning governance and processes for equipment management and maintenance.

Compared to other industries, the importance of maintaining equipment in excellent condition in the healthcare segment cannot be overstated. In the healthcare segment, it is vital to maintain all equipment in excellent condition to ensure patient safety. High-risk and high device class medical equipment, such as defibrillators and ventilators, must follow strict maintenance procedures to ensure sustained patient safety.

Healthcare organisations with exceptional governance over asset and equipment management in their hospital facilities can ensure that they meet regulatory compliance. Depending on your location and governing body, there are various compliance that needs to be adhered to. Not adhering to local, national, or international regulatory compliance will not only affect your organisation’s operations and credibility but could also have devastating effects on patient safety. Here are a few noteworthy mentions to consider:

• Unique Device Identification (UDI)
• Global Medical Device Nomenclature (GMDN)
• European Medical Device Regulation (MDR)

What Functionality Does Medical Equipment Database Software Have?

Medical equipment database software has a range of functionalities that make it a useful tool for healthcare providers and service organisations. Some of the key functionalities of medical equipment database software include:

• Asset Management. The most fundamental feature of medical equipment database software is to contain all the medical equipment and assets related information: manufacturer, model, class, type, codes, associated costs, location, downtime, documentation and more that suit the organisation’s needs.
• Work Order Management. Work orders are, simply put, data related to medical devices: description, priority, type of work requirement, supply requirement and assigned personnel. You can read more about work order management in healthcare here.
• Preventive Maintenance. Most medical equipment has recurring schedules to ensure that the device is in a healthy state. Read more about preventive maintenance of medical equipment here.
• Customer Portal. Simplify the management of customer-related activities in healthcare organisations.
• Helpdesk. Centralised help desk and provide advanced management of service requests. Helpdesk functionality supports the operation of managing and solving incidents of devices and equipment that occur in daily operations.
• Contract Management. Managing hundreds of contracts can be a challenge for many healthcare organisations, this will ease that workload.
• Competence Management. Track and document education, certifications, training, and roles for all personnel.
• Finance. Enables support for accounting activities such as recurring invoicing.
• Patient and Logistics. Patient-focused logistical management of equipment and consumables.
• Integration. Can be integrated into a wide range of third-party software solutions. Some providers even have standardised integrations, ensuring data security and reducing costs.
• Analytics. Make it possible for healthcare organisations to make a data-driven decision base.

Healthcare organisations often need to access their medical equipment across multiple facilities and departments. Cloud-based deployment of medical equipment database software can make it seamless for healthcare organisations to track assets and maintenance requests over large distances. In addition, an equipment management solution offers clinical engineers improved equipment visibility, as compared to managing equipment through an Excel spreadsheet.

What are the Benefits of Medical Equipment Database Software?

Beyond ensuring compliance with regulations and internal requirements, effective management of medical equipment can provide significant benefits to healthcare organisations. The following are some of the general benefits of equipment management database software. By implementing an equipment management database management solution with systematic governance and processes, healthcare organisations can enjoy these benefits, and many more:

1. Streamline Equipment and Asset Management. Enables hospital staff, such as clinical engineers and maintenance teams, to streamline medical equipment management from oxygen-concentrators to CT scanners.
2. Comprehensive Equipment Registry. A comprehensive equipment registry that enables hospitals to have a detailed cover all equipment related information such as model, codes, manufacturer, contracts, warranty, finance, and more. Hospitals will also be able to easily assign requests, work orders, preventive maintenance to available resources, and more.
3. Ease Preventive Maintenance. Most medical equipment requires planned preventative maintenance. Equipment management will ease scheduling of preventive maintenance for all medical equipment. Enabling clinical and administrative staff to easily log and track maintenance requests on medical devices through help desk functionality.
4. Improved Maintenance and Decreased Downtime. Enables hospitals to get more information for planning maintenance sessions. And therefore, prepare repairs and upgrades to be carried out in quieter periods or prepare for increasing resources to manage the tough periods.
5. Maximise Medical Equipment Utilisation: Gathering information about medical equipment can help extend the lifecycle of the medical equipment. Hospitals can gain insight into how much the medical equipment is in use and how often each equipment has a breakdown. This can help medical engineers to better understand the medical equipment they manage. Maximising medical equipment utilisation benefit, in short, means extending the usability and availability, while also improving reliability.
6. Ease Localisation of Medical Equipment. At times, healthcare organisations also write down the location of their equipment as it helps staff locate equipment faster. As a result, they will spend less time tracking down the equipment. It can also have the additional benefit of clarifying what equipment has been rented or loaned, and to whom.
7. Sustain Patient Safety. Importantly, healthcare organisations will sustain patient safety by ensuring that medical equipment are properly maintained according to manufacturer recommendations. Simultaneously ensuring that critical equipment is available when and where they are needed the most.

There are many more benefits that healthcare organisations can expect. If you would like to read more about the benefits, we created an entire list of asset and equipment management benefits for healthcare organisations that expands upon these mentioned benefits and mention many more.

Medical Equipment Database Software, CMMS and EAM

It should be noted that Medical Equipment Database Software can also be referred to as Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) or Enterprise Asset Management (EAM). These terms are often used interchangeably, but they all refer to software solutions that enable healthcare providers to manage medical equipment more efficiently.

CMMS is a type of software that is designed specifically for maintenance management, and it focuses on the maintenance and repair of equipment. On the other hand, EAM is a broader term that encompasses a wider range of asset management activities, including asset management, maintenance management, work order management, contract management, and more.

Irrespective of the specific terminology used, the bottom line is that these software solutions are aimed at helping healthcare organisations manage their medical equipment more efficiently. This reduces downtime, ensures compliance with regulations, and sustain patient safety.

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) for Healthcare

Medusa is an effective and efficient enterprise asset management solution made for the healthcare segment that encircles medical equipment database software and computerised maintenance management systems. The solution supports all processes in the lifecycle of a medical and IT-device. Medusa can be delivered both as a SaaS and on-premise solution. Accessible on both web browser and mobile phone.

Summary

Medical equipment database software is a specialised software that manages medical equipment management in healthcare facilities such as hospitals, clinics, and laboratories. It helps healthcare providers keep track of their equipment, manage maintenance schedules, ensure compliance with regulations. It has a range of functionalities that include asset management, work orders, preventive maintenance, customer portal, helpdesk, contract, competence, finance, patient and logistics, integration services, and analytics. The benefits of implementing medical equipment database software include streamlining equipment and asset management, ease of preventive maintenance, improved maintenance and decreased downtime, maximised medical equipment utilisation, and comprehensive equipment registry.

Ready to take your healthcare organisation to the next level? Contact us to learn how enterprise asset management can help you streamline your operations and ease medical equipment maintenance.