No More Phone Calls A large children’s hospital system, headquartered in Dallas, TX, operates 40 hospitals, numerous emergency care facilities, and outpatient clinics. They also manage 30,000 plus medical devices, employ 7,500 physicians and staff, and are responsible for ensuring a safe, functional, and productive work environment for nearly 5 million square feet of space. In February 2018, the client deployed Nuvolo Connected Workplace for Healthcare 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,” said the Senior Application Analyst on the Technology Management 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.” The client has also uploaded data from its wayfinding 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 Sr. Application 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 HTM team at the hospital refers to doctors, nurses, lab technicians, and all employees as their customers. “We used to have one dedicated resource that collected all the incoming corrective work orders and manually assigned them. With Nuvolo, we have someone that monitors work orders that are automatically assigned by the system, but that takes a fraction of their time,” said the Sr. Application Analyst. Fewer Meetings = More Closed Work Orders The HTM team has also eliminated a number of team meetings as a result of implementing a Connected Workplace solution. As the client 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,” he says. “We have 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, a Story Around Joint Commission Compliance Nuvolo has also saved the client time and effort while trying to successfully manage Joint Commission and other compliance audits, specifically around attestation. All medical devices in the 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 by using Nuvolo OT Security, it’s fully automated. “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,” describes the client. Reminders are automatically sent when owners fail to attest to 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 is actively tracking critical devices. Successfully completing compliance and audit requirements can often hinge on subtle changes in Nuvolo’s system capabilities. As the client explains, “We can now modify our asset data at the model level vs. the asset level. We might have 30,000 devices, but only 3,000 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.” Share
