Care New England Health System evolves clinic engineering to a holistic strategy

Care New England Health System evolved its clinic engineering to a holistic strategy that creates standardization and collaboration across the entire healthcare enterprise and saved them $740,000+ in CE spend.

Care New England (CNE) Health System is an example of a progressive healthcare group who understands today’s complex healthcare technology landscape and need for holistic clinical engineering (CE) strategy.

Comprised of three hospitals and other affiliates located in and around Providence, Rhode Island, CNE relies heavily on its healthcare technology to help provide world-class patient care, with combined inventory of more than 14,000 medical devices and assets.

Challenge

After CMS and TJC changed medical equipment maintenance and management requirements in 2013, CNE needed to revise its current policies and practices to align with the new standards.

They enlisted the help of ABM, who revamped the CE program and set them on the right path to timely and cost-effective compliance.

At around the same time, CNE added another hospital to its growing network. Each member hospital managed clinical engineering differently -- some outsourced while others handled it in-house.

With disparate CE departments, each hospital oversaw its own staff, budgets, and contracts.

Information was siloed, so they had no visibility into the true scope and spend of clinical engineering across the system.

Solution

Working together, CNE and ABM developed a customized enterprise business solution to more strategically and efficiently manage healthcare technology across all CNE member hospitals.

ABM guided CNE to form a leadership task force that included representatives of all member hospitals. This collaborative process allowed them to establish organization-wide best practices; initiate metrics and analytics; create auditable controls; and implement new policies, procedures, and protocols.

The program included the implementation of:

• A system-wide labor infrastructure

• Professional technology leadership and management

• Automated, web-based enterprise technology management system

• Standardized operations and system delivery

• Quality, productivity, and cost performance metrics

The enterprise management system centralized, streamlined, and automated clinical engineering operations, allowing CNE to better manage assets and contracts, schedule and track maintenance requests and work orders, access and share data, and automate reporting.

Web-based, the system also speeds maintenance activities, increases productivity, and reduces delays and downtime. Technicians receive alerts on their phones, and the system also provides real-time client feedback, increasing user satisfaction.