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Five Common Problems in Healthcare Facilities

Facility managers in healthcare facilities are facing complex and growing challenges maintaining both buildings and equipment. Staff must be properly trained and critical equipment needs to be fully operational. Delays caused by outages and repair downtime have a domino effect on schedules across the board, cause significant business and revenue interruption, and potentially jeopardize patient care. QModo’s mission is to provide a user-friendly solution that significantly improves an engineer’s or field technician’s ability to find the right information, at the right place, at the right time.

Poor Compliance Reporting

Too many hospitals lack comprehensive guidelines to ensure equipment is up-to-date and in compliance with authorities having jurisdiction (AHJ’s) such as Joint Commission, CMS, Fire Marshal, Health Department, OSHA and local laws. Instead, they rely on a piecemeal approach to confirm that equipment is maintained, documented, and in compliance – which may be based on outdated information. Non-compliance can not only subject you to legal penalties, but it can severely affect your business operations resulting in lost revenues. Both engineers and technicians have an enormous amount of information, tasks, and responsibilities to manage. They need a solution to give them “The Power of How” that displays important information before work is performed to ensure the safety of engineers/technicians, patients, and staff.

Overlooking Critical Equipment Maintenance

In the healthcare environment facilities teams are responsible for oxygen, vacuum, medical air, nurse call, emergency power, and many other pieces of critical equipment affecting patient care and outcomes. Facility managers cannot afford missteps when performing routine maintenance on critical equipment. Out of range temperature or humidity levels in an operating room can result in surgery cancellations, impacting patient care and causing lost revenue. A tool that integrates with your existing building monitoring systems will provide your teams an overview of current system statuses as well as accurate, step-by-step procedures to correct any problems that might come up.

Reduced Expert Staff to Train New Hires

Adequate staffing of hospitals is fast becoming one of the greatest challenges for facility managers in healthcare. In addition, recent research shows that older, more experienced technicians are retiring in great numbers. This will deprive new hires with the subject matter experts that were formerly instrumental in their training. An application that allows experienced staff to record messages and leave instructions that are directly linked to established repair protocols will eliminate the need for repeated communication with senior staff. Technicians benefit from having an encyclopedia of all hospital equipment in their smartphones.

Outdated Forms and Checklists

It is still common practice for cleaning staff to use paper checklists to document the cleaning of patient rooms. Now more than ever, infection control is critical in a healthcare environment. The forms you print today could be out-of-date tomorrow, but you can stay ahead of the curve by leveraging available technology. Consider the benefits of a tool that digitizes paper forms and checklists. It would allow employees to access current documentation and procedures while recording completed tasks so that you will always know when the job is done right.

No Plan For Internal Emergencies

Most hospitals are required to have Incident Command ready to implement, but very few train regularly, if at all. Should an emergency situation develop, staff are caught off guard and scramble to find out who is in charge, and what needs to be done. Disorder and panic can waste critical time and cost lives. You need a solution that allows you to access the proper information for your role, and be informed not only on what action to take immediately, but throughout the incident. Everyone will know where to go, who to call, and what to do.

Delivering The Power of How

QModo solves all these problems and many more. When a backup generator starts to flash an unknown error code, you no longer need to shut it down temporarily while a technician researches, identifies, and corrects the problem. Even a small water leak in an HVAC unit can cause significant damage to equipment. Anything less than optimal performance of all equipment in an operating room can cost lives. These are concerns common to facility managers across the healthcare industry, and QModo provides the solutions to make these and many other concerns worries of the past.