Healthcare facilities, specialized equipment, surgical instruments, and more — there are a lot of assets in any healthcare environment, whether it’s a clinic or a hospital. How can healthcare organizations effectively oversee and track all their assets to ensure they get the highest value out of them? The benefits of healthcare asset management aren’t limited to being able to keep track of each and every asset; it also can help healthcare providers deliver a higher quality of care and ensure the best medical outcome for patients.
An explanation of healthcare asset management
Asset management is the practice of procuring, tracking, maintaining, repairing, and retiring assets in an optimized way to ensure a business extracts the highest amount of value from them. In a healthcare setting, this process involves managing the physical structure (such as a hospital or clinic building) as well as the systems required to operate the facility (such as heating, refrigeration, ventilation, plumbing, electrical, and many other systems). It also includes healthcare-specific equipment, such as the technology required to analyze and treat patients, as well as hospital beds, wheel chairs, and other equipment necessary for taking care of patients.
While getting the most value from each asset is really important, healthcare asset management also enables an organization to meet strict compliance regulations, assess and mitigate risks, improve the quality of care, and create better patient outcomes. In a medical environment, the organization’s multitude of assets must be in proper working condition at all times — otherwise, a patient may suffer as a result. Unlike in many other industries, in healthcare, proper asset management can have an impact on life or death situations.
Benefits of healthcare asset management
Healthcare asset management provides both healthcare providers and their patients with several advantages:
- Excellent quality of care: Asset management ensures organizations know the location and condition of all their assets. Wasting time with unplanned maintenance or tracking missing assets can lead to unnecessary risks and poor patient outcomes. However, knowing the location and usability of all assets means healthcare providers can plan their upkeep effectively and implement that plan smoothly.
- Lower expenses in the future: Healthcare organizations can substantially reduce unexpected expenditures with healthcare asset management, working proactively to maintain equipment and avoid frequent repairs. Prolonging the life of equipment can also reduce the need for new purchases.
- Better productivity among healthcare staff: What happens if a nurse has to spend 20 minutes of each shift looking for specific tools? What if no one is aware that broken medical equipment requires repairs? These kinds of scenarios are entirely avoidable with proper healthcare asset management.
- Clear insights into asset performance: A part of healthcare asset management includes obtaining and analyzing data about each asset, such as when the organization acquired it, how long it has been in use, the number of repairs made to it, and the total cost of ownership. This information helps healthcare organizations more effectively make informed decisions about future asset purchases and better operations.
Healthcare asset management best practices
A healthcare organization can have hundreds of thousands or even millions of assets, depending on its size. It’s impossible to provide the same level of attention to each asset, so it’s vital to identify which types of assets are critical to maintaining operations and to meeting specific goals. These are the assets the organization should prioritize throughout their lifecycle.
Another best practice involves aligning internal review and management practices with external compliance and auditing bodies. This way, there’s cohesion between what regulatory guidelines require the healthcare organization to do and what the organization needs to do to maintain its assets.
Healthcare asset management enables organizations to increase the value of each asset and provide a higher quality of patient care. Now that you have a deeper understanding of healthcare asset management, the benefits it provides, and key best practices, you can implement it more effectively in your organization.
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