Should Medical Facilities Outsource Medical Equipment Maintenance & Repairs?

Healthcare facilities often outsource their equipment support services to ensure medical equipment is always up and running. However, with health care costs being continually cut and medical funding reduced, many healthcare facilities have now been forced to look for ways to pay for operational costs more wisely.  This is done by improving the equipment maintenance and repair processes, thus ensuring the long-term reliability of the repaired equipment.
Outsourcing medical equipment can have a significant impact on a healthcare facility’s bottom line. This in part is due to the increased sophistication and specialization of equipment such as the refurbished linear accelerators, otherwise known as LINAC, as well as the integration with electronic networks, and the ever-increasing requirements for compliance, safety, reliability and accuracy.
Having an in-house by clinical engineer already on staff to work on simple adjustments and minor repairs can be more costly than paying an outside vendor.  Although it does empower clinical engineers to conduct as many repairs in-house as possible and provides a great opportunity for healthcare facilities to prevent downtime when waiting for an outside technician to get to the hospital.
On the other hand, outsourcing can eliminate the need to hire in-house resources. Therefore labor costs and operational costs can be minimized to a great extent. Instead of hiring an in-house engineer, a medical facility can hire a vendor only on a need be basis. The hired vendor will handle all resourcing needs by tapping into their pool of highly skilled, trained and certified technicians and depending on the facility’s size and levels of technology, outsourcing is beneficial because it will eliminate additional costs such as having a customer service call center and a technical helpdesk. This will not only improve operations but investing in an outsourced program will decrease the costs of managing clinical assets by using a strategic approach to servicing medical equipment.
There are many new independent firms with clinical engineering expertise and comprehensive medical equipment maintenance of the modern, sophisticated and high-end medical equipment that healthcare organizations can benefit from. The probability is that an in-house engineer would cost a hospital just as much as a hired vendor. Why not capitalize on the quality resources and support of such specialists, because medical devices continue to grow in sophistication with every passing day and the need for highly skilled service technicians will drastically increase in the near future.
Hiring a skilled outside vendor will ensure that you have one at your beck-and-call at all times. Nowadays, outside vendors offer remote service options to medical facilities, where the inside technician/ engineer lacks the scope of training needed to successfully implement a modern day equipment maintenance or is unable to do a sufficient job to a certain degree.
In addition to that, outsourced clinical engineering programs have the ability to track equipment inventory in real-time such as the equipment’s age and condition, its failure rate, and preventative maintenance scheduling. This is just a few more reasons to outsource medical equipment maintenance.
Acceletronics is an independent service company dedicated to delivering the best equipment performance and service reliability from Linear Accelerators and CT Scanners across all major brands and models. Learn more about Acceletronics and their selection of new and refurbished linear accelerators and CT scanners today at http://www.acceletronics.com.  To contact one of our LINAC experts call 610.524.3300.