Royal Melbourne Hospital Manages Its Assets

Royal Melbourne Hospital has adopted the Hardcat software in its overhaul of an ageing asset management system, leading to reduced equipment downtime and improved administrative processes (such as integration of the never-ending trail of paperwork).

The new system allows those responsible for systems maintenance and repairs to get on with the job, and makes planning for scheduled downtime much easier to work around.

RMH now has an easy-to-use, intuitive solution which can identify any given asset’s location and repair status, at any time, by anyone in the department. Supporting a proactive management culture, CED’s Hardcat solution has the ability to automatically generate Work Orders when scheduled maintenance is due and to notify departments when Contracts are due for renewal. These functions help to minimise equipment downtime which, in turn, improves patient care outcomes.

There have been significant time efficiencies generated by the use of handheld devices in the field which allow for repair procedures to be checked off in real time as well as a marked reduction in our paperwork.

Other features such as prioritisation of work and process controls help to ensure that engineers complete tasks in the right order and to the required specifications that supports the organisation’s quality control expectations. In addition, there have been efficiency gains through the enhanced visibility of equipment replacement cycles which has led to more accurate cost forecasting.

Established in 1848, RMH is one of Victoria’s leading clinical and teaching hospitals with two city campuses which have a large array of medical equipment that is required for quality diagnosis, treatment, surgical procedures and recovery. As its core objective RMH’s CED is trusted with ensuring that all this clinical equipment is maintained, tested and in a reliable working condition at all times.

Its inventory includes over 10,000 individual assets including everything from Residual Current Devices protecting electric power outlets, through to patient monitoring systems in critical care environments. Many of these items are portable and used across multiple Departments within the organisation’s two hospitals, dispersed satellite clinics and Aged Care facilities.

According to Ms Nicola Donaldson, CED’s Deputy and Quality Manager, one of the biggest challenges they faced was the inability of the database software to be upgraded to incorporate new features such as users logging in job requests, storage of files against service reports and more.

“Our previous system was also unable to support department objectives to increase automation of work orders for scheduled maintenance with the elimination of some of our old paper-based systems,” Ms Donaldson said. “We wanted to be able to easily generate and manage planned preventative maintenance work orders, as well as allowing our customers to raise job requests when incidents call for repairs.”

Other capabilities that were lacking in the old system included an inability to perform bulk data changes across many records in one transaction, the automated distribution of status reports to key stakeholders and the ability to prioritise work orders.

Deficiencies in the old system had started to create unacceptable risks for RMH in governance, regulatory compliance and cost efficiency.

“Our priority had often been to repair equipment and then to worry about the paperwork afterwards,” Ms Nicola Donaldson, CED’s Deputy and Quality Manager, said. “As a result, non-critical equipment risked being left on shelves for lack of prioritisation.”

CED selected a range of Hardcat tools to support the upgrade of its asset management processes. This included the core Asset Register, its Preventative Maintenance and Help Desk modules, as well as Catscan licenses which provided in-field Work Order Management via handheld devices.

The new ISO9001-accredited Hardcat system manages two bar-codes per asset – one for the CED and a second for the Finance Department. It allows for CED to take a holistic or siloed view of assets groups or assets classes while also allowing for the inter-relationships of assets to be mapped and managed.

According to CED Director, Mr Jack Davie, there has been a range of benefits to his operations and the whole RMH organisation from the implementation of the Hardcat asset management system.

Mr Davie said, “We are able to better account for the large number of assets and directly email reports, generate work orders for programmed preventive maintenance, and prioritise how our resources are allocated. This has contributed to making the Department much more productive.