How to Monitor Healthcare Assets When Your Workload Has Exponentially Increased
Increased patient demand, especially in emergency rooms and immediate care treatment facilities, has led to a shortage of medical supplies. Combine that with an increased need for speed in treating patients, and doing anything that’s not immediately necessary falls to the wayside.
Workload increases have also happened in a sudden need to change to telemedicine. Patients who don’t need immediate attention have begun meeting their doctors via virtual visits. The workload that comes with shifting systems suddenly can be stressful and difficult to manage.
For most clinics, monitoring healthcare assets simply isn’t a high priority right now. However, you’ll encounter problems when you can’t count on your assets to be where you need them.
Issues With Postponing Asset Monitoring
If your assets aren’t where you need them, you won’t be able to take diagnostic measures. Running tests will become complicated, and you won’t be able to give patients answers to their medical concerns.
The biggest problem that comes from neglecting to monitor your assets is a lack of information. When you’re not tracking your assets in real-time, you won’t know when problems arise. You also won’t know what your employees are dealing with when they interact with assets.
Neglecting to monitor your assets in real-time also means you won’t notice when assets go missing, or when assets begin to exhibit functional issues. That also means you won’t have accurate asset lifecycle reporting. These issues can result in unnecessary supply spending, which is problematic when there is a supply shortage.
Setting Up Ways to Monitor Healthcare Assets
The best way to make sure asset monitoring continues to happen is to make it as easy as possible. If your medical assistants and doctors have to go through extra steps to help you monitor assets in use, they’re not going to do it.
However, if you make it easy for them to update asset records, they’re more likely to assist you in your efforts to monitor what you have on hand. If it only takes them a couple of minutes while they’re already working on something, they’re more likely to do that than something that will take an hour out of their day.
Create an easy to use system that will help you monitor healthcare assets with little effort. The downside is that this is going to take some effort from you at first to set in motion. If you need to, consider hiring some temporary assistance to help you set up this system. Or, you can use Asset Panda and our team will do most of the heavy lifting for you.
Another easy way to further asset monitoring in your clinics or practices is to require employees to update asset records as part of their usage.
Asset Monitoring Steps
Here’s an example of some of the steps you can set up to help your employees know how they need to assist you in asset monitoring.
- Record what assets you’re using and when
- Use a cloud-based database (like Asset Panda) so you can update it from everywhere
- Set permissions to allow workers access to what’s applicable to them
- Set up reminders so employees don’t walk away with assets
- Create asset usage checklists to remind people what’s involved with using assets
You can still take care of your healthcare assets while you’re dealing with high volume treatment times. Create and stick to a system, and it’ll decrease the overall amount of work necessary to keep an eye on the tools and equipment that support your workers in doing their jobs.
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