Al Klotsche
How COVID-19 has impacted the servicing of essential medical equipment
May 17, 2021
By Al Klotsche
The ongoing pandemic has fundamentally changed our already strained healthcare industry. In the span of a year, healthcare providers have been forced to quickly adapt as COVID-19 continues to shift provider priorities as they search for agile approaches to deal with shrinking case volumes and declining revenue streams. So how do healthcare leaders look to the future to meet the challenge of a historic transformation that is irreversible and continues to be unpredictable?
Navigating successfully through this disruptive new world requires devising strategies that address multiple challenges, the foremost of which is figuring out how your organization will get the most of your service and repair needs at affordable prices. While daunting, it’s imperative to find a good service and repair partner who can help keep your equipment up and running. Here are some tips for getting the most out of servicing and repairing your essential imaging equipment.
Find the right partner
While service and repair is a highly technical industry, it’s also a people driven industry. Even during the age of masks and an overabundance of virtual meetings, relationships matter, now more than ever. Find a partner that really listens and understands your unique needs. They should also be 100 percent committed to doing the right thing to maximize the ROI on your medical equipment, so you and your staff have peace of mind. That includes ensuring maximum uptime, quickly diagnosing and fixing problems, and troubleshooting so there are no surprises.
You also need to ensure that your hospitals and clinics are getting exceptional service at the best price possible. Essential equipment must always be operating at peak performance to minimize downtime and maximize patient capacity. Your service and repair partner should be able to help you achieve that goal with customized approaches that meet the full continuum of your service and repair needs including field service engineers, depot, scopes, and parts and batteries. Your service partner’s historical data should be used to determine whether annual service contracts or hourly billed services are more beneficial for you.
Make decisions that maximize value
Providers need to take several things into account when negotiating pricing. While COVID-19 placed even greater pressure on everyone to find ways to gain cost efficiencies, that cannot come at the expense of quality care. Often, deciding whether or not to replace expensive essential equipment requires a reliable service maintenance partner who can provide an honest cost benefit analysis as to whether or not repairing or replacing an item is the best care versus cost solution. Your service partner should be providing you a break-even analysis on when replacing equipment makes more sense than continued repairs. Well-established service providers will have years of historical data to rely on for this analysis. If independent assessments aren’t proactively sought, facilities can potentially leave a lot of money on the table.
Look for breadth/depth of services
Providers should also look for a maintenance and repair partner that has the breadth and depth of services to meet all their medical device needs. Bundling service and repair contracts with one partner who can do it all reduces the number of vendors your team must work with, streamlines the repair process so it’s easier to manage, and provides cost savings. As providers looked for ways to meet the challenges of COVID-19, consolidation accelerated across all sectors of the industry.
Capture data; Monitor robustly
COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of more robust monitoring and capturing of data and diagnostics to ensure you are able to make better decisions on everything from extending the life cycle of certain equipment, to reducing equipment failure, to recommending better maintenance schedules. Allowing your service and repair partner to access data allows them to recommend areas where you can reduce unnecessary capital expenditures. While this has become critical during the pandemic, it also provides a strong foundation for future advancements and investments and will give providers a competitive advantage in a post-pandemic world.
Check credentials
Be sure your repair partner maintains a rigorous quality management service model that is also fully compliant with regulatory standards including ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 13485:2016. In addition, during COVID, many service and repair providers and OEMs encountered travel restrictions. In some cases, field service technicians were not allowed to enter facilities due to state quarantines which could last up to 14 days. That may continue through the fall. ISOs with flexible service organizations were able to find solutions for their OEM partners who were not allowed into hospitals to support their own customers. In several instances, their service personnel met healthcare facility requirements of being credentialed through services like Reptrax, GHX, Intellicentrics or Symplr. This allowed them to enter the facilities, access the equipment, and get the job done. In addition, find a partner that is capable of servicing multiple modalities. This will give your team the added reassurance that they can streamline equipment service and repair across various equipment lines.
Outsourced service teams add value
As belt tightening continues due to COVID-19, health systems and physician groups must decide whether to manage risks associated with repair and service inhouse or to bring in a trusted outside partner.
Smaller to mid-size systems or hospitals may find that it is easier and makes more budgetary sense to outsource the challenges associated with service and repair. An experienced partner can speed implementation and deliver results more cost-effectively than building the technology and staffing capabilities in-house. An outside team can also train internal resources to take over certain aspects of service and repair, so you get a much more robust workforce at a fraction of the overhead. Even if you decide to maintain an inhouse team, it’s often beneficial to bring in a consultant to help your organization assess what is needed and to get a better handle on your service and repair needs and assess the life cycle of your equipment.
Conclusion
In our new pandemic-centric world, finding the right service and repair model that works for your organization requires financial, technical and personnel resources. However, investing the time to work through this problem and figuring out how to do it right will positively impact patient care and your bottom line. The sooner you get started, the better.
About the author: Allan Klotsche was recently appointed CEO of Alpha Source Group (ASG), the most comprehensive next-generation services provider. In his new position, Klotsche is leading a reinvention of ASG and potentially revolutionizing how the maintenance and service repair industry will meet the needs of healthcare providers now and in the future.
The ongoing pandemic has fundamentally changed our already strained healthcare industry. In the span of a year, healthcare providers have been forced to quickly adapt as COVID-19 continues to shift provider priorities as they search for agile approaches to deal with shrinking case volumes and declining revenue streams. So how do healthcare leaders look to the future to meet the challenge of a historic transformation that is irreversible and continues to be unpredictable?
Navigating successfully through this disruptive new world requires devising strategies that address multiple challenges, the foremost of which is figuring out how your organization will get the most of your service and repair needs at affordable prices. While daunting, it’s imperative to find a good service and repair partner who can help keep your equipment up and running. Here are some tips for getting the most out of servicing and repairing your essential imaging equipment.
Find the right partner
While service and repair is a highly technical industry, it’s also a people driven industry. Even during the age of masks and an overabundance of virtual meetings, relationships matter, now more than ever. Find a partner that really listens and understands your unique needs. They should also be 100 percent committed to doing the right thing to maximize the ROI on your medical equipment, so you and your staff have peace of mind. That includes ensuring maximum uptime, quickly diagnosing and fixing problems, and troubleshooting so there are no surprises.
You also need to ensure that your hospitals and clinics are getting exceptional service at the best price possible. Essential equipment must always be operating at peak performance to minimize downtime and maximize patient capacity. Your service and repair partner should be able to help you achieve that goal with customized approaches that meet the full continuum of your service and repair needs including field service engineers, depot, scopes, and parts and batteries. Your service partner’s historical data should be used to determine whether annual service contracts or hourly billed services are more beneficial for you.
Make decisions that maximize value
Providers need to take several things into account when negotiating pricing. While COVID-19 placed even greater pressure on everyone to find ways to gain cost efficiencies, that cannot come at the expense of quality care. Often, deciding whether or not to replace expensive essential equipment requires a reliable service maintenance partner who can provide an honest cost benefit analysis as to whether or not repairing or replacing an item is the best care versus cost solution. Your service partner should be providing you a break-even analysis on when replacing equipment makes more sense than continued repairs. Well-established service providers will have years of historical data to rely on for this analysis. If independent assessments aren’t proactively sought, facilities can potentially leave a lot of money on the table.
Look for breadth/depth of services
Providers should also look for a maintenance and repair partner that has the breadth and depth of services to meet all their medical device needs. Bundling service and repair contracts with one partner who can do it all reduces the number of vendors your team must work with, streamlines the repair process so it’s easier to manage, and provides cost savings. As providers looked for ways to meet the challenges of COVID-19, consolidation accelerated across all sectors of the industry.
Capture data; Monitor robustly
COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of more robust monitoring and capturing of data and diagnostics to ensure you are able to make better decisions on everything from extending the life cycle of certain equipment, to reducing equipment failure, to recommending better maintenance schedules. Allowing your service and repair partner to access data allows them to recommend areas where you can reduce unnecessary capital expenditures. While this has become critical during the pandemic, it also provides a strong foundation for future advancements and investments and will give providers a competitive advantage in a post-pandemic world.
Check credentials
Be sure your repair partner maintains a rigorous quality management service model that is also fully compliant with regulatory standards including ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 13485:2016. In addition, during COVID, many service and repair providers and OEMs encountered travel restrictions. In some cases, field service technicians were not allowed to enter facilities due to state quarantines which could last up to 14 days. That may continue through the fall. ISOs with flexible service organizations were able to find solutions for their OEM partners who were not allowed into hospitals to support their own customers. In several instances, their service personnel met healthcare facility requirements of being credentialed through services like Reptrax, GHX, Intellicentrics or Symplr. This allowed them to enter the facilities, access the equipment, and get the job done. In addition, find a partner that is capable of servicing multiple modalities. This will give your team the added reassurance that they can streamline equipment service and repair across various equipment lines.
Outsourced service teams add value
As belt tightening continues due to COVID-19, health systems and physician groups must decide whether to manage risks associated with repair and service inhouse or to bring in a trusted outside partner.
Smaller to mid-size systems or hospitals may find that it is easier and makes more budgetary sense to outsource the challenges associated with service and repair. An experienced partner can speed implementation and deliver results more cost-effectively than building the technology and staffing capabilities in-house. An outside team can also train internal resources to take over certain aspects of service and repair, so you get a much more robust workforce at a fraction of the overhead. Even if you decide to maintain an inhouse team, it’s often beneficial to bring in a consultant to help your organization assess what is needed and to get a better handle on your service and repair needs and assess the life cycle of your equipment.
Conclusion
In our new pandemic-centric world, finding the right service and repair model that works for your organization requires financial, technical and personnel resources. However, investing the time to work through this problem and figuring out how to do it right will positively impact patient care and your bottom line. The sooner you get started, the better.
About the author: Allan Klotsche was recently appointed CEO of Alpha Source Group (ASG), the most comprehensive next-generation services provider. In his new position, Klotsche is leading a reinvention of ASG and potentially revolutionizing how the maintenance and service repair industry will meet the needs of healthcare providers now and in the future.