Healthcare CMMS is used in hospitals, healthcare centers, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities to communicate, act on, and monitor tasks across organizations. 

Typically used for periodic maintenance of assets, inspections, and audits, you may think this kind of maintenance software is specifically designed for manufacturing and heavy industry. 

However, while the activities performed in a factory are quite different, hospitals and healthcare providers also follow standard operating procedures and regulatory guidelines. Following these standard processes ensures that no matter who carries out a process, they can easily follow a safe, approved, and predictable format. 

Computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) provide the framework for this standardized approach, giving healthcare providers the consistency and accuracy they need to deliver the best patient outcomes. We believe that the importance of a CMMS for healthcare facilities cannot be overstated.

How to Use CMMS in the Healthcare Sector

Using CMMS software allows healthcare professionals to customize documentation and procedures to the specific needs of their facility. 

CMMS apps can create checklists, procedures, and preventive maintenance schedules, for everything from HVAC to MRI equipment to wheelchairs and stretchers.

Healthcare assets, such as floor scrubbers and photocopiers, also need regular maintenance to keep them in working order. A CMMS allows you to plan maintenance and allocate tasks to a particular staff member or team. 

Likewise, the procedure to prep a room for a new nursing home resident may include a long list of tasks and involve several departments and teams. Again, using checklists within a CMMS will help you meet compliance, safety, hygiene, and regulatory requirements and ensure that customer expectations are met. 

“Healthcare Facilities Management integrates the principles of planning, operations and business management with the engineering and medical services to create and preserve a safe and effective healthcare environment.”

Health Facilities Management

Benefits of a Healthcare CMMS

Helps You Meet Regulations

The United States has strict regulatory frameworks for critical situations such as surgical procedures. 

Best practice approaches, such as the World Health Organization’s surgical safety guidelines, aim to help reduce the alarming statistics around patient outcomes. For example, nearly half of all adverse events in hospitalized patients are related to surgical care. With CMMS, healthcare managers can implement digital work orders to lower the risk of infection and reduce adverse surgical outcomes. 

MaintainX’s global procedure library houses pre-formatted procedures for the healthcare sector, including the surgical safety checklist. 

These procedures show how a CMMS can help Infection Protection and Control (IPC) teams meet company, state, and federal regulatory requirements. 

Helps You Understand Who Is Accountable

A robust CMMS, such as MaintainX, helps healthcare management teams give specific personnel sign-off authority and allocate tasks like equipment repairs to vendors outside the healthcare organization.

In the event of an adverse patient outcome, well-implemented preventive maintenance practices encourage root cause analysis to find the failure to prevent equipment failure in the future. 

Likewise, if something goes wrong in the workplace, CMMS is useful because it stores digital trails of who completed a task, who approved it, and if any warnings were reported. 

Helps You Maintain Medical Equipment and Be Ready for Emergencies 

An efficient, productive, and well-maintained facility depends on its equipment being in good working order. 

Hospitals often have hundreds of critical pieces of equipment in their asset inventories, from radiography machines to vaccine refrigerators. With a real-time inventory management system, each piece of equipment has its own specific maintenance requirements. 

Healthcare CMMS tools reduce downtime by tracking equipment status to make asset management manageable. Healthcare managers can schedule preventative maintenance work orders and assign teams with just a few clicks. Teams are immediately notified of both routine work orders and urgent repair requests.

Helps Temporary Staff Follow Procedures

Facilities management must ensure that everyone follows the correct processes and procedures in large facilities or workplaces with a high percentage of casual and temporary. 

A CMMS solution helps overcome this challenge by allowing organization-wide access to relevant tools, checklists, instruction manuals, and guidelines. As a result, new employees who are not overly familiar with workplace processes can access a single source of truth to find the approved way to carry out their work.

Examples of CMMS Use in Healthcare

Healthcare professionals use CMMS tools in different ways: to 

• Monitor uptime of critical equipment, such as scanners, operating room booms, and autoclaves, to ensure periodic maintenance is performed on time.
• Ensure gold-standard procedures are always followed, such as surgical safety, COVID-19 healthcare planning, and transport and arrival of patients.
• Conduct PPE, safety audits, and hazard identification to ensure compliance with OSHA regulations in the workplace. 
• Create checklists and standard operating procedures for cleaning and disinfecting surgical instruments and carrying out support services, such as kitchen and laundry operations. 
• Store instruction manuals for critical equipment maintenance so they are accessible by employees at all times.

How to Implement a CMMS with MaintainX

MaintainX is a CMMS solution available on the web and as an app via the AppStore or Google Play. Healthcare professionals can use its simple interface to create checklists, add standard operating procedures, allocate tasks, and log work orders.

Using a CMMS will help you and your team:

• Gather real-time information about your operations
• Digitize your data and eliminate version control issues and outdated information
• Generate reports to analyze trends to work on continuous improvement
• Monitor the status of equipment and quickly respond to unplanned breakdowns 
• Maintain an audit trail of who did what when
• Collaborate across departments and streamline communication 
• Decreased reactive maintenance, improved efficiencies, and increased profits

A user-friendly CMMS in your healthcare facility will save time and improve efficiency to provide the best patient care. 

Ready to implement a healthcare CMMS? Try MaintainX for free.