Pierre-Le Gardeur Hospital PDF 1MB

GE Healthcare
Pierre-Le Gardeur Hospital
AssetPlus™ Helps Québec Healthcare Region Provide
Quality Service Management for Facility & Biomedical Assets
imaging equipment used for MRI, CT, digital radiography,
angiography, mammography and nuclear medicine, for
example. In the case of CSSS du Sud de Lanaudière, the total
number of facility and biomedical assets across the region is
roughly 14,000.
To manage this collection of assets, CSSS du Sud de Lanaudière
had previously been using a home-grown, client/server
application and database solution developed by one of their
biomedical technicians, using Microsoft Access. In addition to
providing asset inventory management, the application handled
work orders for corrective maintenance (i.e., responding to user
service requests submitted when an asset is working incorrectly
or breaks) as well as for preventive maintenance (i.e., regularly
scheduled requirements for asset service, cleaning and
recalibration). A small Microsoft Access client application
installed on each hospital computer allowed users to submit
service requests and track work order status.
In a fashion similar to regional Health Authorities in BC and
Alberta, and LHINs (Local Health Integration Networks) in
Ontario, the province of Québec consists of regional
consolidations of local healthcare facilities called Centres de
Santé et de Services Sociaux (CSSS).
The CSSS centred around the Montréal suburb of Terrebonne,
which is officially called CSSS du Sud de Lanaudière, serves
a catchment area of nearly 270,000 citizens spread across 516
square kilometers. It includes 18 facilities and features one
major hospital (the 283-bed Pierre-Le Gardeur Hospital), four
long-term care facilities, two local community service centers
(Centre Local de Services Communautaires – CLSC) and several
medical clinics.
CHALLENGES
It is widely accepted that enterprises of all types need to track
capital assets, such as IT assets, for example – the servers,
storage, PCs, network components and peripheral devices that
are critical to supporting today’s business operations. Cost
management, asset utilization, timely maintenance and
support, end-user productivity and satisfaction, and regulatory
compliance are but a few of the benefits possible from solid
asset tracking and management.
Asset management is equally important in hospitals and other
healthcare facilities; however, the challenge in this environment
is greatly compounded by the need to track two additional,
arguably even more important classes of assets – building
facility and infrastructure assets as well as biomedical assets.
Building facility assets include items such as air-handling units,
chillers, elevators, heat exchangers, fire alarms, toilets, sinks,
lights, beds and bed lifts, to name a few. The biomedical assets
typically include items such as infusion pumps, patient monitors,
fetal monitors, defibrillators, thermometers, ventilators and
many others. This asset class can also include diagnostic
“Likely the biggest single problem with this system was that only
the person who developed it knew anything about how it was
designed or operated, so we were totally dependent on that one
person to always be available to help us fix bugs or provide user
support and enhancements,” explains Luc Dandeneau,
Technician, CSSS du Sud de Lanaudière (Pierre-Le Gardeur
Hospital).
Dandeneau goes on to say that for comprehensive asset
management, they needed a more powerful system that would
provide greater functionality in support of preventive
maintenance and also provide online access capability. Online
access would not only make it easier for users to submit service
requests, and allow them to submit requests from anywhere,
but would also eliminate the need for the organization to install
and maintain software on each user desktop – a desktop
management nightmare for most IT organizations.
“We also wanted some sort of statistics and reporting capability
that would capture service data so we could analyze that data
for service performance trends and provide reports for a variety
of management and regulatory compliance and hospital
certification purposes,” adds Dandeneau.
SOLUTION
To select a new asset management system, a selection committee
was formed that, in addition to Luc Dandeneau representing the
biomedical technicians, consisted of the manager of the
biomedical service department, the manager of IT and several IT
professionals. After reviewing proposals, listening to presentations
and witnessing demonstrations by numerous asset management
product vendors, the selection committee chose GE Healthcare’s
Asset Plus™ Asset Management Solution.
AssetPlus™ is an enterprise-scale, online Computerized
Maintenance Management System (CMMS) application
designed to assist healthcare managers manage clinical and
non-clinical assets throughout their service life. Built around an
asset inventory database that captures and stores asset profile
and service event information, AssetPlus™ provides
maintenance management tools and offers Web access to end
users for service request submission, and to service technicians
for work order handling and tracking.
“We chose AssetPlus™ for a number of reasons, not the least of
which is that it was developed specifically for the healthcare
environment and is especially suited to biomedical assets,”
reports Dandeneau, who says they were aware of AssetPlus™
as a result of an earlier purchase of a suite of medical imaging
devices from GE when they moved into their new hospital.
The committee’s choice of AssetPlus™ was aided by a customer
site visit to the the Institut de Cardiologie de Montréal, where
AssetPlus™ had already been in use for a number of years,
managing 8,500 biomedical and facility assets.
“Previously, we were using a home-grown system that covered
only our medical equipment inventory and maintenance
interventions,” says Sébastien Authier, a Biomedical Engineer at
the Institut de Cardiologie. “With AssetPlus™, we gained
considerably more, including the ability to schedule preventative
maintenance operations, manage spare parts inventory and
orders, and manage service contracts. Authier also reports that
AssetPlus™ allows them to extract statistics and indicators that
help them with their asset replacement program and the
evaluation of different maintenance scenarios.
“The Institut de Cardiologie was using AssetPlus™ exactly as we
expected to use it, and we saw how well it met all of the needs
we had at that time, and also offered some additional capabilities
we could grow into later, such as managing our third-party
service contracts,” enthuses Dandeneau.
Workflow Redesign Highlights AssetPlus™ Deployment
The implementation and configuration of AssetPlus™ at CSSS
du Sud de Lanaudière went smoothly, with one notable item
being the need to properly migrate existing asset data from the
hospital’s legacy Access system over to AssetPlus™.
“By working closely with the GE installation expert to export the
data from the old system in Excel and carefully re-map the
format to be compatible with AssetPlus™, we were able to
complete the migration successfully and without a problem,”
states Dandeneau.
Subsequent AssetPlus™ training followed two paths. For the
roughly 30 administrators, super users and technicians servicing
facility and biomedical assets, GE provided the training, using an
AssetPlus™ expert from France, who could deliver the training
in French. For end users – the roughly 300 frontline staff
throughout the hospital using the various assets and submitting
service requests – training was provided by the secretary of the
biomedical service department.
“Since users only access AssetPlus™ through the Web interface,
and the service request form was configured to be very easy for
them, requiring only two or three basic steps on their part, it
was a simple matter to train them when they registered to use
the system,” explains Dandeneau.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the AssetPlus™
deployment at CSSS du Sud de Lanaudière, however, was the
effort by expert staff from GE Healthcare to assist with the
redesign of the hospital’s technical service processes in order to
simplify and streamline department operations and get the
most benefit from the use of AssetPlus™.
The GE implementation team consisted of an AssetPlus™ expert
from Canada and one brought over from France specifically to
provide training and installation support in French. Together,
they conducted a 6 Sigma Change Acceleration Program (CAP)
exercise to help service staff optimize the flow of work orders,
from the submission of service requests by nurses and other
users, right through to the closing of those work orders.
“This value-added effort on the part of GE was clearly outside
the project scope, and the great job they did helped us
immensely,” Dandeneau freely admits. “In addition to his
AssetPlus™ expertise, the GE consultant had the unique ability
to unite our team into a common agreement on how to
configure the system, what roles people should play and how
our processes should flow,” observes Dandeneau, pointing out
that the senior manager responsible for the technical services
area of the hospital congratulated the GE team, saying “this is
exactly what we needed!”.
RESULTS
As a result of the implementation, Dandeneau and his service
colleagues now use AssetPlus™ to manage roughly 14,000
assets, including the hospital’s medical imaging equipment and
the facility and biomedical assets in the 19 other CSSS du Sud de
Lanaudière facilities across the region. Service technicians at
those other sites use the Web Access interface to AssetPlus™ to
receive and close work orders as well as to manage preventive
maintenance actions.
According to Dandeneau, adoption of AssetPlus™ is very high
throughout the region, with frontline users and service
technicians alike willingly using the system to manage assets
and service actions on a daily basis. Technicians, for example,
find the system very powerful and are especially pleased about
the ability to attach a wide range of documents to the asset files.
Service contracts, service reports, calibration certificates,
maintenance checklists, purchase orders and other documents
are all centrally stored and linked to each asset in the database
for easy retrieval.
End users like AssetPlus™ because the Web module makes the
system easy to access from anywhere, requiring only a standard
browser, and because of how the system has been configured
to make it simple for them to complete and submit service
requests, and track the status of outstanding requests.
“Our the asset management system is much more stable than
what we had before – we’ve never had any crashes or lost any data
with AssetPlus™ – and if we need support, there are a lot more
people we can talk to you,” remarks Dandeneau, who says that
apart from some occasional configuration assistance, the only
support they have really needed over a five-year period has been
the installation of three or four planned software version upgrades.
A Wide Array of Benefits
“Overall, we have found AssetPlus™ to be very helpful in
increasing the efficiency of our service team and workflow, as
well as improving the utilization and performance of our assets,”
claims Dandeneau.
With AssetPlus™, comprehensive asset profile, preventive
maintenance and service history information readily available
– how many times an asset has been repaired, how much time
was required, what was done to it last time, when the
manufacturer’s warranty expires, etc. CSSS du Sud de
Lanaudière technicians and management are better able to
spot asset maintenance and service performance trends,
reconcile third-party repair bills, track asset cost of ownership
and build rationale for capital replacement recommendations.
“Being able to keep our PM checklists, processes and service
history information up to date and easily accessible also plays a
critical role in helping us meet regulatory requirements and
maintain government and industry certifications,” adds
Dandeneau, citing as an example how the hospital’s clinical
laboratory, which is ISO-certified, needs access to information
in AssetPlus™ on equipment service and PM compliance.
In a similar example, for the hospital’s regular certification by
Accreditation Canada, which occurs every three years, auditors
want to see that the hospital has a PM program in place for
biomedical assets.
“When we show them how we manage PM using AssetPlus™,
with all the checklists and follow-ups, that is usually perfect for
them, and helps us pass our certification,” enthuses Dandeneau,
who is quick to share his team’s plan to go beyond the basic use
of AssetPlus™ and activate additional functionality.
As an example, he cites using the system to manage third-party
service contracts so that a complete record of purchase orders,
costs and renewal dates can go into asset files to help with
asset management, analysis and reporting. He also mentions
tracking and managing the hospital’s spare parts inventory in
AssetPlus™, which would ensure technicians always have
sufficient parts in stock and help with service cost management
and reporting.
A Showcase Site for AssetPlus
The technical service team at CSSS du Sud de Lanaudière is so
enamoured with the results it gets using AssetPlus™ that it acts
as a customer reference site in support of GE business
development efforts with other potential customers. Joliette
Hospital in the adjacent CSSS du Nord de Lanaudière healthcare
region, for instance, recently acquired AssetPlus™ after a site
visit to Pierre-Le Gardeur Hospital and demo by Dandeneau and
colleagues.
“Similar to the situation we had here, the people at Joliette were
having difficulty with the asset management system they were
using and asked GE about AssetPlus™. After seeing that the way
we were using it was exactly what they wanted to do, they
bought it,” exclaims Dandeneau, who concludes his comments
by saying that, “We have a great working relationship with GE,
and I continue to get excellent support from the AssetPlus™
expert there who helped us install it six years ago and has been
available to us ever since.”
GE Healthcare
2300 Meadowvale Blvd.
Mississauga (Ontario) L5N 5P9 Canada
www.gehealthcare.com
©2012 General Electric Company
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