Within every health setting in the U.S. are thousands of clinical devices, providing lifesaving treatment and essential support services. It’s widely cited that there are about 15 to 20 clinical devices on average per hospital room. While necessary for patient care, clinical devices create complexity for hospitals and health systems because they re quire significant maintenance, security and compliance. The manual effort to track, service and maintain devices contributes to rising costs. In fact, it’s estimated the U.S. spends $93 billion annually on medical equipment lifecycle management, according to data from revalize.
Clinical devices also require staff training to ensure correct use, are subject to regulatory requirements, and present cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Fundamentally, clinical devices cause risks for providers if they are not managed appropriately, said Vishakha Sant, global head for healthcare providers at ServiceNow. For example, the growing prevalence of connected clinical devices, which are devices that transmit data to other devices or through the internet, are causing ransomware vulnerabilities. A recent survey from Capterra found medical practices with more than 70% of their devices connected were 24% more likely to experience a cyberattack than practices with 50% or fewer connected devices.
“Healthcare is all about managing risk, and devices are a vital aspect of that,” Sant said, adding that mismanaged devices can lead to misdiagnoses, security breaches and penalties from regulatory agencies.
Effective clinical device life cycle management: How to improve outcomes and manage costs
To manage this risk, clinical device life cycle management is crucial. But the traditional method has gaps, including manual tracking with spreadsheets and paper, and capturing information on homegrown systems. Typically, hospitals will parse out various elements of device life cycle management and assign them to different departments or vendors to manage. For example, one vendor will be hired to oversee only device security while another is solely focused on servicing the device. This leads to inefficiencies, more spending and less transparency.
“I can't tell you how many times we ask our hospital customers, ‘Do you know how many devices are in your network? And the response is a staggering, ‘No,’” Sant said.
Effective clinical device life cycle management should have several key elements, beginning with a comprehensive platform that allows for end-to-end management of clinical devices. In this white paper, we’ll explain:
- The key tenets to establishing a clinical device life cycle management program
- Best practices to cost-effective clinical device life cycle management
- The advantages to patient outcomes and hospital and health system operations
By effectively managing the life cycle of all its clinical devices, hospitals and health systems can achieve vast improvements in several areas critical to delivering optimal experiences to patients and care teams, bolster security and resilience, and protect investments.
Enhanced cost savings
Successful clinical device life cycle management results in cost savings. On average, clinical devices are the second largest line item in the operating budgets for hospitals after labor expenses, according to Sant. By managing the life cycle of clinical devices appropriately, providers have readily available access to device inventory, usage and deployment data, making it easier to identify devices no longer in use but utilizing scarce maintenance and storage resources.
Clinical device life cycle management can help hospitals to get rid of underutilized equipment, often at large cost savings. “When you think about how to actually bring the cost of devices down, it’s to effectively get the full use of that device as well as reduce the total cost of ownership,” Sant said.
ServiceNow estimates hospitals can save millions of dollars on average through successful clinical device life cycle management by seeing improvements in health outcomes, workforce experience and cost savings.
Improved health outcomes
Research and reporting shows that thousands of patients have been harmed or injured by faulty clinical devices. Additionally, mismanaged device management can lead to delays in care because the devices either can’t be found in a timely manner or aren’t functional.
When executed correctly, clinical device life cycle management reduces the likelihood of these events. For instance, when a hospital has appropriate mechanisms in place to track recalls on devices, it prevents those devices from being used improperly on patients, decreasing the risk of infections and diagnostic errors.
Further, when clinicians and employees are appropriately trained on how to use, sanitize, and store a device through rigorous life cycle management measures, the probability of patient harm and delays in care from devices vastly declines.
Workforce experiences and efficiencies realized
Workforce experience is another improvement that can be realized through clinical device life cycle management. For example, workstations on wheels, or WOWs, have rapidly become a staple in healthcare operations. Clinicians and support staff who use WOWs need to be able to locate them quickly and efficiently. With proper tracking protocols in place, staff can locate WOWs and other key items in real-time.
With successful clinical device life cycle management, staff spends less time looking for devices, retrieving them and ensuring their compliance because they have access to all the necessary information through a comprehensive platform. Deploying effective clinical device life cycle management also ensures staff understand when a device needs or is receiving repairs, which improves workforce efficiency overall.
To experience the full extent of benefits from clinical device life cycle management, leaders can implement best practices for acquiring, deploying, monitoring and retiring clinical devices.
Consolidate to one digital platform for all your clinical device needs: Investing in a comprehensive platform solution that enables end-to-end management of clinical devices is an essential component to effective clinical device life cycle management. Too often, hospitals and health systems deploy a siloed approach, hiring different vendors or tasking individual departments to take on various aspects of device management. This can cause critical pieces of information and data to slip through the cracks.
With ServiceNow, hospitals and health systems receive management for the entire life cycle of a device, from ordering the device to decommissioning it and taking it offline. ServiceNow’s digital platform tracks the inventory of all devices and their deployment, as well as installs workflows that are triggered when security threats occur and when maintenance or audit functions are needed. Moving clinical devices to a digital platform also streamlines operations across the care continuum to improve patient care, boost productivity and facilitate security and compliance.
“What ServiceNow does is provide a comprehensive infrastructure and platform that allows you to best manage and actually operate devices so that they are safe and properly deployed and maintained,” Sant said.
Adopt strategic cloud-based solutions for data integration: Additionally, ServiceNow supports the growing demand and expectation across the industry for cloud-based platforms and solutions, which create digital processes and workflows that are prevalent inside and outside of the organization.
Another element of end-to-end clinical device life cycle management is data integration. Devices are retrieving and exchanging data constantly. A siloed approach to device management prevents that data from being shared in a useful way for providers and patients. ServiceNow allows a central source for device data to be stored, enabling clinicians to evaluate information from many devices.
“The ability to have device integrations so that you can get a pooled set of information for clinical decision-making is essential—that’s what’s going to help us improve patient outcomes,” Sant said.
Ensure leadership is invested for the long haul: Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, leadership buy-in is an essential component of effective clinical device life cycle management. Device management is not a one-and-done exercise, but rather requires ongoing investment and attention. To achieve this, hospital and health system leaders must be committed to a culture of safety and data-based decision-making.
“There needs to be clear goals and priorities related to allocating resources and budgets to support these goals,” Sant said. “Putting investment in device management can really pay off in the long run if you make good decisions up front.”
It can be overwhelming for hospitals just beginning efforts to achieve clinical device life cycle management because there are many different elements involved.
To account for this, a good question to ask when beginning the process is: What problem are we trying to solve? If a hospital is experiencing a security attack from a device, that’s the area they will want to address first. For another hospital, their goal may be to lower their total cost of device ownership and achieve operational efficiencies.
As an end-to-end clinical device life cycle management platform, ServiceNow can start with the areas most important to any individual customer.
“We can support customers wherever they are on their journey,” Sant said.
Learn more about clinical device management with the ServiceNow platform here.
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