Improving patient experience through effective asset management in healthcare

Healthcare is a sector where device reliability and high quality are essential. Taking good care of these assets is important as even a small malfunction can cause harm to your patients.

Before jumping into the topic, let’s first understand what we mean by asset management in this context.

What is Asset Management in Healthcare?

Asset management in healthcare is about systematically managing, maintaining, and disposing healthcare assets. These assets can be different medical equipment or even IT devices. In short, the idea of asset management is to ensure that all devices are working properly, undergo maintenance according to the device manufacturer’s guidelines, and are used to their full potential during their lifecycle.

Five Ways Asset Management Enhances Patient Experience

How is asset management connected to enhancing patient experience? Let’s explore five key areas where effective asset management makes a significant impact.

Reduced Equipment Malfunctions:

Proper asset management ensures that medical equipment is regularly maintained and updated. This minimizes equipment failures, which can delay treatments and affect patient trust and satisfaction. 

For example, with asset management software you will be automatically informed when your equipment and devices need scheduled maintenance or require updating. 

Increased Equipment Availability:

Effective tracking of medical equipment ensures that they are available when needed. This leads to smoother procedures and shorter wait times, significantly improving both patient and employee experience.

This will also save time for your organization as you won’t spend time searching for missing devices. Having good visibility of equipment availability can easily save multiple hours per week per employee. Furthermore, adding indoor live tracking to your asset management allows your healthcare staff to find critically needed equipment quickly within a large facility like a big hospital.

Enhanced Safety:

As mentioned before, regular maintenance and effective management of your assets ensure that equipment is safe for the patients, reducing the risk of accidents or errors during treatment.

Systematic asset management also ensures compliance with regulatory standards like the IVDR (EU) and CAPA (US).

Data-Driven Decisions:

Asset management also helps plan and budget new equipment investments. With the information gathered within your asset management solution, you will understand the current needs of your organization better. Better data, better RFPs, better pricing.

In addition, an asset management solution will give you information on assets that need to be replaced in upcoming years. This will minimize surprise purchases and help you to stay on the budget.

Privacy: 

Data security and privacy are a key element to consider whatever the setting. Asset management does not typically include any patient data and is therefore not as sensitive as other systems like electronic healthcare records. That said, asset management does include data about your organization and its employees and vendors so it is important to make sure the asset management solution you are utilizing is secure. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications are the ones to look for.

Conclusion

In healthcare, where patient safety and patient experience are of utmost importance, effective asset management is an easy and fast way to ensure optimal resource use, reduced wait times, and a safer environment for patients.