The Road to Interact 2012: Preventive Asset Maintenance for Healthcare
One of the toughest things about running a business in a complicated industry like healthcare is managing all the stuff. The physical operating assets of any organization — facilities, equipment, machinery, technical infrastructure — are the heart and soul of a well-run and functioning business. Healthcare has stuff in spades.
Facilities managers and the maintenance and operations professionals see up close and personal every day that keeping things working is essential to…well…keeping things working. For healthcare decision-makers in particular, the efficient management and maintenance of those physical assets — from computers and CT scanners to hospital facilities and generators — has long been one of the foremost logistical, financial and operational challenges that they face. And at a time when the industry is becoming bigger, more complicated, more expensive, and increasingly reliant on highly specialized machines to provide the diagnostics and treatment required to optimize patient care, the connection between operational efficiency and medical efficacy is more apparent than ever. With tighter profit margins, an accelerating pace of technical advances and continuously evolving regulatory environment, the ability of any medical facility or healthcare-related business to keep things running smoothly and get the most out of physical assets is essential from a purely economic standpoint as well.
If it were all so easy, right?
The big question, of course, is how: how can you make that happen? How can you upgrade your facilities’ and assets’ maintenance and management in a way that improves patient care and saves money? As many hospitals and healthcare organizations are discovering, one of the best answers to that question lies in an exciting concept known as Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM). A coordinated ALM approach to maintaining, servicing and (when necessary) replacing physical assets can have an enormously positive impact on a healthcare organization, saving time, boosting productivity and efficiency, and improving patient care. PeopleSoft ALM is a premier solution in this space, especially when integration with other PeopleSoft applications is important: PeopleSoft ALM is a robust program that enables organizations to prioritize assets and ensure enterprises are investing in them at the proper levels to meet utilization, uptime and business goals. As the consultancy that has been involved in more PeopleSoft ALM implementations than any other in North America, that’s something that we have seen firsthand.
My colleagues and I will be spending some time over the next few weeks featuring blog posts outlining some of the ways in which ALM can and does make a difference. This is real world stuff, not ivory tower fluff. We’ll go over some of the maintenance challenges faced by businesses in the complex industry of healthcare, review some of the risks faced by those businesses when they don’t effectively address those challenges, and take a detailed look at the best practices of PeopleSoft ALM implementation and the positive results that can be achieved with a successful ALM strategy. In other words, we’ll be giving you the information and tools you need to determine if your assets are working as hard as you are — and to help you understand what to do next if the answer to that question is not to your liking.
We’d love to hear from you if you have questions or thoughts about this. Don’t be afraid to email us. This is a hot topic right now in healthcare and there are many questions. Fire away.
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More links:
Learn more about Interact 2012, where MIPRO will be exhibiting.
MIPRO Consulting main website.
