From the August 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


That type of data monitoring and infrastructure is difficult to come by for in-house departments in his opinion. “If you go to the administration and ask for the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to accomplish that, you’re probably not going to get it. OEMs should ask for the specs. It’s a proof of concept — you will save money.”

The monitoring requires a shift in thinking and a change to historic roles. Teahan stresses that responsibilities should be clearly outlined for the OEM and if there’s in-house or third party, they should know their roles as well. So that there’s not a situation where everyone thinks the other group is handling a problem.


Ultimately, he believes regardless of whether you use OEM coverage or clinical engineering internal, there has to be an independent monitoring system that monitors both sides of the equation — the equipment and the house environmental side, so that the appropriate group can access the logs and see what the problems are.

“This is the future,” Teahan says. His facility has been using OEMs for parts and service for more than a decade and he feels strongly that it’s the right decision. “Do I want my budget to go down? Yes. But there’s a balance and I see the other side of it,” he says. “If a CT scanner in a hospital setting is down for any period of time, forget the cost in money, what about the cost to the patient waiting to get in or be discharged? I believe in five-year’s time, when hospitals and OEMs actively monitor systems that we can cut the cost of service significantly and provide better service and uptime to the end user, and the end user — me, the docs, the patient — will be much happier. A 24/7 hospital has to happen because you can’t have downtime for these types of equipment. Maybe there is a balance between all in-house and all out-house. I have that balance because I have in house engineers provided by the OEM. I know there’s a cost attached to that. But we have proven over 10 years that it works,” Teahan concludes.

Neighbors to the north

While the same rules dictating service and maintenance in the U.S. don’t apply to Canada, the basic challenges still hold true. That is, hospitals still look to maximize equipment uptime while minimizing service and parts expenditures. Chris Buck, executive director for the Lower Mainland Biomedical Engineering program, offered insight into how his group handles service and parts. LMBE services four health authorities, including Fraser Health in Vancouver B.C. and provides service to 26 acute hospitals with approximately 5,000 beds total. The largest facility they service is Vancouver General with just over 1,000 acute beds. His full-time staff numbers 193 with 172 being technologists.

According to Buck, Fraser Health has only a few service contracts with companies. In part, that’s because of the difference in Canada’s equipment maintenance requirements. “We canceled a lot of service contracts, particularly for imaging and some in monitoring,” Buck says. “We use outside service providers for some specialty work, particularly MRI cryogen work as this is more cost effective and safer than training our own people who would not get sufficient hands-on time to stay competent,” he says.

August 2014 Magazine

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