The InterMed Group is a premier provider of integrated technology management services for the global healthcare industry. Headquartered in Alachua, Florida, InterMed’s clinical engineering focus delivers better patient care by ensuring that that the most complex and essential equipment used in the medical industry today—including digital radiography, X-ray computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and other nuclear, ultrasound and optical imaging techniques—is safe, compliant and operational. The firm’s multi-modality approach paired with its asset management, preventative maintenance, comprehensive imaging services and rapid deployment ‘jump teams’ allows them to address any technology need in any healthcare setting seamlessly. Today, nearly 80,000 technology assets are under InterMed’s management across 46 states. Its highly specialized workforce was relying on an older, computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) that was general in purpose. Designed for plant operations and facility management, it lacked any specific features for clinical engineering and health technology management. The firm’s core services help healthcare providers prepare their most expensive and sophisticated equipment to meet the increasingly complex regulatory and security requirements. The challenge was that the current system was not designed to accommodate the essential set of customer requirements, forcing employees to rely on manual workflows and record keeping that negatively impacted productivity. Limited mobile capability, lack of offline functionality, and cumbersome and inadequate reporting were among some of the key issues facing the organization. These limitations made it challenging to ensure data accuracy and hygiene and to obtain meaningful operational information from the data needed for optimized full-lifecycle technology equipment management and efficient use of resources. InterMed’s team knew it needed a more modern cloud-based approach that would address these limitations. They wanted a platform that was mobile friendly and available to them both online and offline. Employees were often unable to leverage their CMMS while at a customer site due because of poor network performance or limited Wi-Fi connections when servicing equipment deep inside the hospital’s walls. Analytics were hard to come by as team members took hours to cull through numerous data fields and run hard to configure reports. There was limited or no customization capability for their legacy HTM application. This hard-coded solution relied on one or two programmers for changes, which generally meant that new capabilities were very difficult to add and took an extraordinary amount of time. For example, Intermed provides cybersecurity assessment on equipment as part of its overall portfolio of services. The challenge was that there was no way to update the system when tracking the nineteen (19) different data fields including IP address and mobile serial numbers that are considered crucial. The only option was for the team to resort to manual reporting. “We wanted a more efficient way to manage technology assets and provide our clients the data and analytics they need, when they need them,” said Rick Staab, InterMed’s chief executive officer. “The most effective way to accomplish this was to leverage a modern, cloud-based platform with native reporting and analytics, which consistently delivers a high-performance experience.” Why Nuvolo? InterMed quickly discovered that most of the systems on the market were still general purpose in nature, limited in terms of modern functionality and inflexible and expensive in terms of configuration. In evaluating the Nuvolo Healthcare solution, InterMed learned for the first time that a modern, flexible and fully on-line and off-line mobile enabled capability was available with very robust reporting and analytics capability. The platform stood apart from all of the others and the differences were clear. InterMed’s formal evaluation process resulted in the selection of Nuvolo’s Healthcare solution for several important reasons. The Nuvolo platform is purpose-built for InterMed’s precise business requirement focused on comprehensive service management for clinical engineering and healthcare technology. Nuvolo Clinical EAM offered Intermed both industry-leading functionality and flexibility, with a modern click-to-configure cloud-based architecture built on ServiceNow. It was clear that the Nuvolo solution could deliver a higher level of service management productivity Intermed requires. The selection of Nuvolo also provided Intermed a service management platform that will allow them to keep pace with the passion and dedication of their jump teams. “The fact that Nuvolo was cloud-based and provided us real differentiation in terms of ease of use, reporting and on and offline mobile capability, were critical deciding factors. The Nuvolo team also has a deep knowledge and understanding of the healthcare industry and were very responsive to healthcare industry issues that matter most to us and our customers. Nuvolo checked all the boxes for us and made our decision to select their platform an easy one for our team,” said Staab. “Time to value was also impressive. In fifteen weeks from contract signature, we were fully operational on our new platform and managing the complex service management requirements for our customers.” The Nuvolo solution enables InterMed to deliver better equipment uptime, make more efficient use of their resources and utilize real-time reporting, analytics and dashboards to better understand and measure productivity, compliance, work order queues, priorities and other service management metrics in a visual format to improve customer service and decision making. How Nuvolo Helps InterMed sought an accelerated implementation of Nuvolo Clinical EAM, so it could quickly take advantage of the platform’s advanced capabilities and Nuvolo delivered. Optimized Healthcare Technology Management Unlike other solutions, Nuvolo’s platform is specifically designed for clinical engineering and healthcare asset and services management. Most of the capabilities InterMed needed were already in the platform. Additional capabilities that were needed were quickly and efficiently added by Nuvolo and the Intermed Team’s own resources with no need for IT or programmers. The team was able to take immediate advantage of the platform’s flexible, click-to-configure architecture. Modern Platform Nuvolo’s modern cloud-based and mobile-enabled platform is built on ServiceNow, the world’s leading enterprise cloud infrastructure is relied on by more than 4,000 companies worldwide every day. The rich capabilities of the Nuvolo Clinical EAM platform can rapidly scale to include functionality and data needed for InterMed to provide robust and scalable health technology management to their customers. Visual Editor The Nuvolo Clinical EAM platform is easily configurable, making custom development obsolete. The InterMed Team can utilize simple configuration to ensure platform capability, reporting and dashboards to meet each customer’s specific requirements. The flexibility of the platform ensures InterMed can keep pace with the ever changing demands of their customers and no longer be constrained by a legacy system and a one-size-fits-all methodology Connected & Disconnected Mobile Nuvolo’s connected and disconnected mobile capability ensures maximum productivity for on-site service management. Service technicians can initiate, open, update, submit, check status, view knowledge and close technology equipment work orders on their mobile device. When network connections are sparse or unreliable, the team utilizes the platform’s robust offline functionality and then syncs their data once back online. Digital Documentation The InterMed Team has the digital documentation they need to expedite equipment management and maintenance while on-site with their customers. Nuvolo’s Active Knowledge capability automatically understands every clinical devices make and model and auto-populates any work order type with the correct artifacts at the time the work order is opened by the service technician. These artifacts can include user manuals, policies, procedures, diagrams and work notes. In addition to active knowledge, the team can also utilize Nuvolo’s digital floor mapper technology with customized interactive mapping to pinpoint the equipment’s precise location, improving efficiency and service delivery time. Streamlined Safety & Liability Management Every healthcare technology device comes with a detailed and sometimes complex manufacturer procedure checklists for both planned and corrective maintenance. The InterMed Team needs access to this information in a digital format in real-time to ensure patient safety and liability management. Nuvolo digitizes every manufactured specified or AEM procedure checklist into its secure cloud architecture. When a work order is opened a digital checklist is presented to the service technician, ensuring proper safety and compliance. All activity related to the procedure checklist completion is time-stamped, date-stamped and logged and available for reporting. These capabilities provide InterMed a more seamless process to track compliance and ensure patient and product safety. These modern capability also allows InterMed better liability management, more detailed work log data, better analytics and improved decision making Real-Time Reporting & Analytics The InterMed team can finally analyze what the data really means and ensure accuracy. Using Nuvolo’s all-in-one integrated platform, InterMed receives operational data, trend reporting, performance details and dashboards through a single system of record for clinical asset inventory and work orders. There is no longer a requirement to rely on manual workflows to retrieve data. The team gets real-time insights, certifies equipment performance data and can pinpoint maintenance issues faster and more efficiently. The primary benefit of real-time reporting and analytics is minimizing disruption to our customers patient care delivery process. The Nuvolo Clinical EAM platform’s three levels of maintenance analytics—corrective, preventive and predictive – enables the InterMed’s jump teams to provide more responsive healthcare equipment maintenance. Best-In-Class Security A flexible and mature enterprise cloud architecture is important when working to respond quickly to a rapidly evolving regulatory, compliance, and data security environment. Hard-coded, legacy systems present numerous hurdles for a service provider like InterMed. The Nuvolo platform provides the flexibility to ensure the correct data is being captured and that new fields, forms, workflow and business rules can be operationalized to meet new regulatory, compliance, safety and information security requirements. Responsive Customer Care InterMed knows that better patient outcomes result from clinical equipment that is safe and maintained consistent with AEM or manufacturer specifications. Fewer incidents, fewer claims, and healthier patients are the goal. Nuvolo Customer Care’s healthcare industry knowledge gives our jump teams the ability to be fully supported in the field. Share
