By Eric Morgan /Special to Healthcare Facilities Today

When you hear the words “best practices and healthcare systems” what comes to mind may not be the usual topics that directly impact patient care. After all, medical standards and regulations have required healthcare organizations to uphold a businesslike mentality, rather than a patient-focused approach. 

But did you know that an underlying benefit which is key for healthcare organizations, improves patient care and reduces operating costs is facility maintenance.

Proper maintenance and upkeep requires an organized system to keep track of the day-to-day needs of a facility.  An excellent computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) can fulfill this role. This critical healthcare system gives HTM professionals the ability to proactively manage work requests, inventory items, and assets, which in turn can improve patient care and reduce operating costs.

In Maintenance Connection’s recently released 2017 Healthcare Facility Maintenance Report, we asked more than 1,000 healthcare maintenance professionals about their daily operations, how they use a CMMS, and the return on investment (ROI) they’ve seen from CMMS implementation. Many weighed in, and the results may surprise you.

Study Results #1: 37 percent of healthcare maintenance teams are inadequately trained on CMMS technology. One of the first steps to realizing the most return on a CMMS investment is training and on-boarding of the entire maintenance team.

A recent study found 37 percent of healthcare maintenance teams were not adequately trained on the system used by their organization. Without proper training, your team may not understand and value how to properly track work-orders for critical assets, how to perform inventory control for unexpected emergency requests, or how the system helps meet compliance.

Furthermore, proper CMMS training and implementation leads to true success across the hospital or healthcare facility. In fact, in the MC 2017 State of CMMS Report, 63 percent of healthcare pros reported that CMMS implementation helped improve system reliability and reduced downtime.  Now that is a savings worth noting.

Maintenance teams who gained the highest ROI from a CMMS have the following three characteristics in common:

• They work with business leaders to align CMMS goals and advantages with existing operations and ensure buy in from key stakeholders in the healthcare organization.

• They remain committed to comprehensive and continual training beyond the initial implementation phase for the entire team.

• They chose a CMMS provider that has a historical and proven success team that on-boarded their team and helped users define goals, roles, and milestones and then followed up continually.

Study Find #2: Twenty-seven percent of healthcare maintenance teams have room to improve work-order tracking.The best CMMS solutions offer these benefits within work-order tracking functionality:

• Access to real-time work order information from the field

• The ability to send pertinent service request information directly to team members for faster response times

• Easy task definition and assignment, with added details such as record instructions, materials, photos etc.

• Full visibility to open work orders across all technicians and locations.

While work-order tracking may seem like a no-brainer for healthcare teams, the study found that more than one-quarter of facilities (27 percent) are still not tracking all work orders digitally on the CMMS. 

Across a healthcare facility, work-order tracking helps teams maintain project transparency, improve response times on critical assets, streamline the amount of paperwork needed, and improve patient care.

The report also revealed that 64 percent of facilities that configure most work orders in their CMMS report strong improvements to service satisfaction.

Study Find #3: Sixty-seven percent of healthcare teams have yet to realize the power of mobile a CMMS.

Mobile CMMS is changing the industry. A mobile CMMS can help healthcare facilities save time by providing information about the maintenance professional’s location, offer real time work requests to save drive time and eliminate the need for paper-based work orders.

Mobile CMMS technologies also increase labor productivity since techs can access work orders, documents, and photos straight from their mobile device for less downtime.  Unfortunately, many health care facilities are not taking advantage of this great feature.  

Key finding No.4: Healthcare organizations that perform more preventive maintenance, as opposed to reactive or corrective maintenance, realize stronger ROI on their CMMS investment.

Our report found that 55 percent of healthcare respondents maintain a 50 percent or greater PM ratio. In doing so, these organizations decrease asset downtime and reduce costly repairs with PM schedules.

Beyond that, nearly 90 percent of healthcare respondents that have achieved an 80 percent or greater PM ratio report improvements to asset life. With nearly all PM procedures in place, these respondents enjoy less downtime and overtime hours, fewer emergency requests, and extended asset life. What’s more, that same group of respondents who have an 80 percent or greater PM ratio report significant cost savings, fueling the idea that more PM equals higher ROI.

Below are other key takeaways from the report:

• 40 percent of respondents process more than 500 work orders each month.

• 67 percent realized reduced risk and liability, improved system uptime and reliability, better compliance, lower labor costs, and significant overall cost savings tied to CMMS adoption.

• 55 percent indicated reactive maintenance procedures at least 50 percent of the time—versus PM, which extends asset life, lowers the risk of critical asset downtime, and reduces emergency work orders.

Eric Morgan is the CEO of Maintenance Connection, a Utah-based CMMS provider.