Large Regional Hospital System Automates Attestation

No More Phone Calls

A large regional hospital system with over 3 dozen facilities and tens of thousands of medical devices deployed Nuvolo’s Healthcare solution in February 2018 to modernize and automate its planned and corrective maintenance for its medical device fleet.  The result since go-live has been improved clinical engineer productivity and increased service management efficiency. 

“When a corrective work order was submitted before Nuvolo, the technician often made a phone call to the person reporting the issue to obtain more information about the device and issue.  There was also no way for us to know the precise location of the equipment,” explains a Senior Analyst on the hospital system’s team. “With Nuvolo, we utilized a digital form on our enterprise portal with mandatory fields that requires the reporting person to provide device details.  We even have a picture of the MAC address label on the form to make it easier for them.”  They’ve also uploaded data from their Way-Finding System into Nuvolo, so technicians now not only know the location of the device, but a fully optimized route to get to the device.  “It’s just much better than the way we did things before,” according to the Analyst.

Eliminating the Work Order Traffic Cop

Armed with all necessary information, the Nuvolo system auto-assigns the corrective work orders to technicians based on how the “customers” complete the work order.  The hospital system’s HTM team refers to doctors, nurses, lab technicians and all employees as its customers.  “We used to have one dedicated resource that collected all the incoming corrective work orders and manually assigned them,” added the Analyst.  “With Nuvolo, we have someone that monitors work orders that are automatically assigned by the system, but that takes a fraction of their time.”

Fewer Meetings…More Closed Work Orders

The hospital system’s HTM team has also eliminated a number of team meetings as a result of Nuvolo.  As the Analyst describes, “The first of every month, we used to have a meeting to sort all the preventative maintenance tickets for that month because we couldn’t auto-assign tickets to technicians.  That’s one of the meetings we no longer have.  “We’ve gotten a lot more efficient in allocating our staff and having them focus on delivering great service management rather than having to monitor tickets not related to their work.  Everyone used to have to look at the queue.  Not anymore.”

Automating Attestation

All medical devices in their system are assigned a classification, and some are designated as “critical.”  A critical device or asset may be classified as such for any number of reasons; it may hold sensitive patient information or is particularly expensive.  All critical devices must be “attested” regularly by their owner, usually a director or management-level resource.  Prior to Nuvolo, the attestation process was managed on spreadsheets, but now it’s fully automated.  The Analyst describes it as follows,

“Periodically, an email is automatically generated with a list of all critical devices owned by the email recipient.  They click on a link for each device to attest that the device is still in their department’s possession and is still actively in use.” 

Reminders are automatically sent when owners fail to attest their devices.  Within a structured time period, escalations are sent to owners’ managers if devices remain un-attested.  Automating this important compliance requirement saves time and also builds confidence with auditors that the hospital system is actively tracking critical devices.

Successfully completing compliance and audit requirements can often hinge on subtle changes in Nuvolo’s system capabilities.  As the Analyst explains, “We can now modify our asset data at the model level vs. the asset level.  We might have 20,000 devices, but only 2,000 models.  By classifying everything at the model level, it’s easier to assure that risk levels across models are consistent, and consistency pleases the auditors.”