How to Establish and Drive Medical Equipment Standards

Medical equipment standards are the roadmap for any medical equipment planning project, providing a single point of truth for all stakeholders involved. This makes communication crucial to ensuring every member of your team understands and upholds these standards.

Using the right tools, you can easily communicate standards across your organization without any undue stress. By effectively creating and adopting these standards, your team can keep every aspect of the project in line and ensure a final positive outcome. Follow along to discover how you can keep your team on the right track, and what tools may be most effective for driving your medical equipment standards.

Why medical equipment standards are essential

When deciding who your stakeholders should be, it’s important to think beyond the day-to-day users of your equipment. As you consider how to assemble a broader team, ask yourself these questions:

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  Continuity. Standardizing your equipment to a specific model (or narrow list of models) minimizes the amount of training and maintenance expertise required from technicians and medical professionals.
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  Clinical care. Your team of healthcare workers can provide the best care when their environment and equipment are predictable.
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  Controlling costs and budgeting. Understanding the equipment your facility uses, and the time and money it takes to procure, learn, and maintain that equipment will help facilitate a more accurate capital management plan or routine replacement roadmap. You also may have more negotiating power if you’re driving a standard with a specific brand.

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How to drive standards across your organization

Standards are vital to your project’s success, which is why they need to be universally accepted across your organization. If you’re having a hard time getting your team on board, here are four strategies for establishing and driving the adoption of organizational equipment standards.

Include all key stakeholders.

Assembling a cross-functional team is critical to managing a top-notch equipment standardization initiative. Your team should include everyone who operates, interfaces, and comes into contact with the equipment. This can include:

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  Clinicians
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  IT
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  Building management
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  Finance
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  Biomedical engineering
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  Security
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  Infection control, and more.

Not every organization will be able to include all of these stakeholders, but the more stakeholders who are consulted, the more opportunity that all aspects of improving patient care can be addressed.

Make sure standards are highly visible

Whether you’re exporting and routing a full equipment list, holding a global meeting, or working in a medical equipment planning platform, your team’s awareness of industry standards is crucial to your success. Enabling your stakeholders to easily access and validate chosen equipment to make recommendations enhances the opportunity for a successful equipment standardization project. With Attainia from Revalize, you can grant access to each of your stakeholders so they can easily review the equipment list.

Establish leadership buy-in

Support from key executives and managers ensures that the standards are followed and you can avoid off-standard purchases for one-off items or physician preference items.

Review and update your standards on a regular basis

Select a timeframe that works for your organization — perhaps every three to five years — to audit the standards you’ve put in place. Evaluate your results over time and ask yourself some key questions, such as:

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  Is the equipment working well?
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  Should you make a change?
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  Is the pricing competitive?

Make sure the standards you created are still serving your organization, or update accordingly.

Attainia makes medical equipment standardization easy

Creating and maintaining standards is a big task — but also a critical one. Efficiently leveraging these equipment standards starts with the right medical equipment planning program. Attainia’s medical equipment planning platform is designed to fit your standards and keep your process simple with features that let you:

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  Easily create and share standards by using room templates
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  Access the Attainia catalog to research options available in the marketplace for each category, including details on price, useful life, specifications, and other important details
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  Grant access to the stakeholders in your organization, so they can review and collaborate on standards directly within the software
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  Use standards to leverage your GPO to ensure the best pricing and realize the best value
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  Call out standards in the catalog through the use of favorites

The Attainia equipment planning platform not only ensures standards visibility, it also serves as a single point of truth for critical stakeholders and everyone else involved in making equipment selection decisions.

To better drive medical equipment standards across your projects, choose a solution that makes sharing and establishing standards easy. For medical equipment planners, Attainia provides the ability to house, maintain, and add organization scope products — as well as identify products under contract. This allows users to address many aspects of standardization within the software.

Learn how you can drive performance with Attainia today!

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