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COMPANY SHOWCASE Get the Most Out of Your Clinical Assets BY JONATHAN LANGER, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, MEDIGATE
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ecent events have shown us just how critical good asset management is to the ongoing operations of healthcare delivery organizations everywhere. When the World Health Organization (WHO) put out a surge calculator to help governments and health care providers estimate the essential supplies they need to respond to the current pandemic of COVID-19, that was only a piece of the preparation process. The potentially harder part for many hospitals was taking those requirements and measuring them against their own inventory to identify shortfalls and needs.
LACK OF VISIBILITY CAUSES PROBLEMS AND INEFFICIENCIES The reality is that many health care
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providers don’t have the real-time visibility they need into their connected medical devices to know exactly what they have. And it is certainly a challenge for them to accurately pinpoint where each of these devices is located and how frequently they are being used. This lack of up-todate information at their fingertips can create confusion and chaos, as hospitals have to rely on best guesses and scramble to pull diagnostic and biomedical equipment together to meet needs. This has been the case for some time now. It is not uncommon for an organization to dedicate time and money to conducting manual inventories of their facilities, with people going room by room, floor by floor,
building by building to document what devices are where. But as we know, since devices are moved around constantly, the moment that inventory is done, it is out of date. Plus, these inventories are often incomplete, lacking details around embedded software and protocols in use that can be important when assessing vulnerabilities and making preventative maintenance decisions. WHY MEDICAL DEVICE VISIBILITY IS SO DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE Typical discovery techniques used to detect and profile general IT equipment don’t usually work for medical devices. One of the reasons is medical devices are typically closed systems, using proprietary operating systems
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