Here are a few tips to assess your facility’s needs and make your case stronger:
• Perform an equipment inventory and an aging and repair history analysis: Assess your inventory needs today and your projection for three to five years down the road. To get a clear picture of your current endoscope assets, perform a hands-on inventory to locate all endoscopes accountable to your unit. Your inventory log should contain data that includes equipment models, serial numbers, purchase dates, scope age (in years) and appropriate comments or descriptions. Some OEMs can provide medical device histories for endoscopes repaired through their facilities.

• Refer to your scope repair histories to help you trend the data and identify opportunities to reduce repairs.Repair logs can help identify problem scopes, or isolate areas of handling and repair protocols that need attention. Repair logs also are useful for calculating an instrument’s downtime. For instance, if a colonoscope is out of commission a total of 23 working days for repair work, based on a 240-working-day calendar, this colonoscope was not available for service about 10 percent of the time. Not only is the downtime an inconvenience, but when this scope is out of commission, it places more wear and tear on the facility’s remaining inventory to keep up with procedural demand.
You also can use the repair logs to calculate your annual repair expenditures and compare them against applicable national benchmarks. If your costs are higher than national averages for peer facilities, you probably need to re-evaluate your scope inventory mix and repair protocols. Benchmark data is usually broken down in a number of ways, so it is important to use current trending data by scope type since specialty scopes typically have higher repair cost per case averages than standard workhorse endoscopes.

• Calculate your facility’s utilization. Endoscopes with the highest utilization rates often require the most frequent repairs because of general wear and tear, and repeat exposure to harsh reprocessing chemicals. Aging workhorse endoscopes with low utilization rates may have fallen out of favor with physicians, so they may need to be removed or replaced. Endoscope utilization rates often indicate whether a facility’s inventory mix meets procedural and technology demands. At the sample facility highlighted in the chart on page 60, 45 percent of the facility’s scope inventory is used to perform 67 percent of its total case volume. To calculate endoscope utilization, you can document the utilization rate of individual scopes or the overall endoscope inventory by type, as shown in the example. Automated endoscope reprocessor logs offer one simple way to accurately calculate scope utilization data, or you can retrieve this information from procedure note documentation.

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