Maintenance in the medical device space is a multiple-level commitment for any field service company. From typical break and fix repairs to maintenance schedules and inspections, many agreements can be put in place to repair diagnostic, imaging, surgical, laser, and hospital equipment that could potentially be lifesaving.
How Field Service Software Helps
Having a field service application to manage all the work is essential to keeping customers satisfied and staying ahead of the competition in a highly competitive field. A field service management solution gives you a way to keep track of service level agreements, helping to automate the process of providing maintenance on highly technical equipment that can’t be offline for any great amount of time.
Hospitals and labs require their equipment to be operational always, so having a preventative maintenance schedule, either through a contract or service level agreement, will help to maintain the equipment regularly and keep it in peak working condition.
Those schedules and contracts can be entered into the field service software, and offer a level of automation by generating work orders for those scheduled visits, putting them into the queue of jobs to be dispatched. Checklists, tasks, and parts can all be automatically applied to the work order, so technicians are aware of what needs to be completed on a piece of medical equipment.
Medical Devices and the Internet of Things (IoT)
The medical device space is a benefactor of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and brings field service automation to another level. Sensors can detect calibrations that are off, temperatures that need adjusting or potential problems with a piece of medical equipment, and send a notice that a maintenance call is required, without someone physically seeing the defect. This level of automation, provided by IoT, ensures medical equipment is kept online and minimizes any offline time in the health field.
With continuous schedules for maintenance in place, being able to see the repair history of a device will help in a higher first-time fix rate. One method provided in field service applications is a barcode scanner, which allows each piece of medical equipment to be tagged with its unique barcode that, when scanned, brings up previous maintenance schedules, solutions, and parts to fix the equipment. That level of detail will help a technician diagnose the problem quickly while offering a continued maintenance history for future repairs.
Offline medical equipment is costly, so maintaining a high level of preventative service is critical for hospitals and labs who need their device for health services. With a field service application, the multiple levels of automation can keep these critical pieces of equipment online and in service to those whose lives and health depend on them.