GE Healthcare
How to bring Trust Equipment
Department teams together
in a comprehensive unit
Great Western Hospital achieved the integration of 3 services
—equipment library, biomedical workshop and equipment
management— into a single business unit through asset
management with AssetPlus™.
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Customer Profile
Great Western Hospital
Great Western NHS Foundation Trust
Great Western
Hospital
Public sector
650 beds
6,000 medical assets
United Kingdom
Challenge
To create a hospital-wide access to
medical assets data, sharing the asset
management solution and harmonizing
the processes to achieve business
integration.
Solution
Common processes and shared information
The Trust Equipment Department’s three sub-departments used to work independently.
Along with paper filing and tedious procedures, the lack of an efficient common asset
management solution and maintenance contract management made monitoring
maintenance and costs very difficult. The challenge was to get a modern solution like
AssetPlus™ to record information about medical devices, and enable all teams to create
work orders following the same procedures. This in turn, would lead to the production
of advanced reports to support informed business decisions.
AssetPlus™
GE Healthcare Asset management
solution
Benefits
• Business unit integration
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• Enforced quality management
• Service improvement
• Contract management
Common asset management process
What Asset & Quality Coordinator Ronald Cardy had in view when he outlined the needs for the ISO 9001:2008
accredited Trust Equipment Department, was a modern asset management solution, digitally distributed
and shared among the teams, with harmonised procedures and methodologies. “Our Trust Equipment”
department comprises 3 main areas: An equipment library, a biomedical workshop, and an equipment
management area. This looks after the contractual side of things, non-medical equipment repairs, asset
management and quality management.”
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Preventive maintenance
Ronald Cardy supervised the creation of the desired consistent inventory of all medical assets references.
“We basically rewrote the rules on what we wanted an asset management system to do, and what
we wanted to do with it. In terms of preventive maintenance, we manage approximately 6,000 items
through AssetPlus™. The programmed alarms and alerts for the preventive maintenance allow us to
spot exactly what needs to be done – and when. Currently, our use of AssetPlus™ covers the recording of
assets, corrective and preventive work order management, use of control sheets and a certain amount of
parts management.”
Customised reporting from AssetPlus™ database extractions are easily set up. “We export data from
AssetPlus™ via Crystal Reports to Excel and then generate the required reports within Excel very easily.
This has allowed us to create standard reports that the management team reviews and analyses every
single month. This we believe allows us to make better and more informed decisions.”
“[Our] teams embraced the
changes very well; they
were able to use AssetPlus™
swiftly and extended their
use of it beyond what we
originally intended.”
Quality & change management
Ronald Cardy,
Custom reports
AssetPlus was found to be a sound basis for bringing about change, thanks to its ease of use and
ergonomics. For instance, Great Western Hospital’s Quality Management System requires that the
biomedical department teams “understand individual processes and the system as a whole and are able
to make sound business decisions to improve services. The use of AssetPlus™ has assisted us in fulfilling
this requirement by creating a common controlled process. With regard to the actual implementation
of AssetPlus™, individuals appeared to grasp the concept very easily. The biomedical teams for instance
embraced the changes very well; they were able to use AssetPlus™ swiftly and extended their use of it
beyond what we originally intended.“
™
Asset & Quality Coordinator
for the Trust Equipment Department,
Great Western Hospital,
Great Western NHS Foundation Trust,
United Kingdom.
©2011 General Electric Company – All rights reserved.
Flexibility
GE and GE Monogram are trademarks of General Electric
Company.
Although AssetPlus has been designed to allow biomedical engineers to tailor parameters, customise
the interface and profile authorisations; Ronald Cardy and the teams were satisfied with the vast arrays
of available data and criteria. “We did not initially customise the product; we actually used it ‘out of the
box’. One of the things I particularly like is the way you can change the names of the fields and limit that
change to just a profile. That is quite useful and does allow for local customisation without changing the
integrity of the overall system.”
™
“All processes change and it is important that AssetPlus™ is flexible enough to allow us to make
significant changes to the database. We had a purchasing system with a set of supplier codes that
we had imported into AssetPlus™ at start-up using the provided import tool. Recently, we changed to a
brand new purchasing system with a new set of supplier codes. We were able to easily retire all the old
vendor codes and import the new ones – totalling about 9,000 codes. But even more importantly, because
the field names were different in the new purchasing system, we were able to customise the headings
ourselves within AssetPlus™ so there was a complete match.”
AssetPlus is a trademark of General Electric Company.
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Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks
or service marks of others.
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