The maintenance team works throughout a hospital or healthcare facility to improve efficiency in the delivery of patient care every day.
Because regulations play a major role in the industry, healthcare organizations must keep accurate records on patients, assets and overall maintenance efforts to demonstrate compliance and reduce operating costs. To deliver high-quality care and improve the patient experience, healthcare facilities rely on a CMMS to make the entire record keeping process easier and more efficient.
Read on for three ways healthcare maintenance teams can increase productivity and efficiency in record keeping with a CMMS.
1. Shift away from a paper-based facility with automated reporting
For years, healthcare management was the domain of paper charts and file cabinets. Healthcare professionals who should devote their time to patient care would spend time completing manual tasks. These paper-based activities not only hindered productivity but also accuracy.
With automated reporting on a CMMS, healthcare facilities are able to streamline traditional record keeping processes altogether. Automated reporting tools allow for quick insights to asset performance and KPIs. This is a huge benefit to healthcare professionals who can access electronic medical records anytime, anywhere. It’s also beneficial for facility managers who can plan and schedule for maintenance repairs before downtime occurs.
Automated reporting also supports maintenance managers with daily tasks. They’re able to pull data to support business-driving insights from anywhere in the field. This helps them get a gauge on average response times, equipment failures and maintenance requests across departments.
2. Demonstrate compliance with regulatory standards
The primary purpose of healthcare compliance is to improve patient care. However, as regulatory standards and policies change, so must facilities. Healthcare facilities have to deal with being audited at a moment’s notice. Although this may be intimidating, automated reporting with a CMMS can help your facility accurately and efficiently prove compliance.
With automated reporting on a CMMS, healthcare managers and professionals are able to access asset information with ease. Beyond that, automated reporting provides healthcare facilities with a traceable record of all maintenance tasks performed. This is extremely beneficial to healthcare facilities during unexpected audits.
Specifically, a CMMS helps maintenance and healthcare professionals quickly pull data to demonstrate compliance, like:
- Risk analysis
- Life safety tracking
- Equipment monitoring
- Past maintenance procedures
Automated reporting presents healthcare professionals and managers the luxury to demonstrate compliance without complications.
3. Reduce the manual workload while improving patient care
According to Building Design and Construction, studies have shown that when looking at the total lifecycle cost for a healthcare facility, a proper maintenance strategy helps bring down overall costs. Because of this, healthcare facilities strive to improve maintenance and increase efficiencies when possible.
Using a CMMS to improve record keeping, healthcare facilities can reduce manual, time-consuming tasks and improve patient care. This is because the maintenance team spends less time on manual tasks and more on asset upkeep, which can ensure excellent patient care. As a result, the healthcare facility becomes more efficient in the retrieval and storing of records. Beyond that, CMMS reduces waste and errors associated with traditional methods of medical documentation.
Ready to learn how your healthcare facility can improve record keeping while meeting compliance with a CMMS? Download our ebook, How Hospitals and Healthcare Systems Gain a Competitive Advantage Through Better Maintenance, for more information.
