How to Perform Successful Healthcare Asset Audits

Healthcare asset audits are a vital part of making sure your medical practice conforms to compliance regulations. Your patients depend on you to provide care that protects and helps them.

However, not all asset audits are created equal. You need to know how to best conduct one to ensure you’re catching any and all potential problems. Here’s a step-by-step process on how to conduct a successful audit of your healthcare assets.

Understand Compliance Requirements Before You Start

Audits are only helpful if you know what you need to inspect. Medical equipment has specific compliance requirements before they can be used in a clinical setting. Understand what laws and regulations apply to each device before inspecting them.

One helpful tip is keeping compliance requirements in the asset records themselves. That way, you don’t have to spend extra time during your scheduled audit looking up compliance requirements and create more stress for everyone involved.

Consult Asset Records

You can easily prepare for your audit by regularly tracking your medical equipment and devices. Without this, you won’t have data to evaluate during your audit. This can create problems, because you need to see how your assets perform throughout the year, not just during the time of the audit. While your assets may not have issues now, they could be failing during peak times.

When it’s time for the asset, use records to compare asset performance. Having all of this information in one place will help you see which devices are being used, and which ones are only costing you money.

Inspect Assets to Make Sure They Match Records

While having asset records can be helpful, you need to ensure their condition and usage matches your records. It’s impractical to try to inspect everything, so only pull a few things to make sure it matches. You can pull them at random or set up a system with certain flags for conditions that require inspection.

Interview Employees to See How They Use Assets

As part of your audit, you should spend time with your employees to see if their experience with your assets matches up to the information in your records. Again, it’s impractical to try to interview everyone, but there are certain people who you should contact.

Figure out which employees are using assets the most. You can also contact managers to see what their experience is in supervising employees under them. They’ll be able to give you asset usage information for several people at once.

Schedule Regular Healthcare Asset Audits

Compliance requirements have often outlined how often you need to conduct healthcare asset audits. This is to make sure your equipment is sticking to safety regulations and that your patients are receiving the care they deserve.

Conducting quarterly audits will also help you get a good picture of how your practice is performing at different times of the year. You can see how busy times strain your assets, and regularly take out equipment that isn’t serving you and your team.

Asset Panda values the work that you as medical practitioners do to keep your patients and community healthy. We’ve created a straightforward system to help you track your medical assets and keep them in top condition. Our team is here to help you set up and maintain your asset tracking system, both during audits and throughout the year. Check it out free today!