by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | August 14, 2017
From the August 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
"Knowing your parts provider will help determine if those costs savings translate into value," says an AllParts Medical spokesperson.
He adds that third-party companies with good quality management processes and controls, facilities and equipment to test and repair parts and make necessary investments in talent, can deliver the same level of quality as OEMs. Without those pieces in place, the quality of the parts could suffer and that leads to prolonged downtime.
Ad Statistics
Times Displayed: 19503
Times Visited: 365 Stay up to date with the latest training to fix, troubleshoot, and maintain your critical care devices. GE HealthCare offers multiple training formats to empower teams and expand knowledge, saving you time and money
In any discussion regarding third-party parts, it's also important to understand the different terms, since they can have varying definitions. When vendors use "tested" or "refurbished" to describe their parts, customers should ask what that means and what those processes look like.
"The answers to these questions can help determine if this is a vendor you want to trust with your business," says AllParts.
In some cases, jumping head-first into lower-cost third-party parts solutions without conducting due diligence can wind up costing more in the long run.
A cautionary tale comes from Stanford Health Care, which purchased third-party batteries for its infusion pumps believing they work just as well as the OEM batteries, according to Harvey Fortune, senior manager of biomedical engineering at Stanford.
“The OEMs will [take out] all of the third-party parts and put their own parts in there because they have to validate their repairs and they won’t validate it if there are third-party parts in it,” he says.
Because of that, the health system makes it a priority to either have an ISO repair equipment with third-party parts or to purchase parts directly from the OEM.
Mandatory training
At the AAMI conference, George Mills, director of engineering at The Joint Commission (TJC), announced that the organization will be undertaking new measures to ensure that in-house engineers are properly trained.
“Before it wasn’t a regulatory requirement and that is why a lot of hospitals were saying they don’t have money for things and then the training was ad hoc and that puts people at risk,” says Fortune.
For high-risk equipment, or equipment that requires vendor training, Fortune budgets so that he can send his staff to factory training. High-risk equipment includes anesthesia and dialysis systems, which require certification to service.
For low-risk equipment, he will have one engineer go for factory training who will train the rest of the staff.
Many of the OEMs are restricting access to their documentation and logins to their machines unless the engineer is properly trained. To gain access, they also require software service agreements that are billed on a subscription basis.
