Reliability-Centered Maintenance: The Right Fit for Healthcare?

Should Healthcare Maintenance Organizations Adopt an RCM Strategy?

Facilities and HTM departments face conflicting priorities, with emphasis placed on minimizing impact on patient care caused by unplanned downtime of assets while sticking to budgets that aren’t always sufficient to ensure proper resources and staffing. Additionally, pressure to conform to manufacturer recommendations in equipment care can lead to excess spend of time and money where it may not be needed.

What is Reliability Centered Maintenance?

Among maintenance operations models, RCM, or Reliability-Centered Maintenance, is growing in popularity. Originating in the aviation industry, this method has caught on in manufacturing, power, and sanitation industries where the consequences of asset failure are high.

For healthcare organizations, an RCM strategy can be one of the most beneficial approaches to hospital maintenance, focusing on the idea of optimizing the reliability of assets through a thorough understanding of historical failure rates, incorporation of sensor technologies (i.e. thermography), and condition-based maintenance practices with an evolution towards predictive maintenance. Reliability-Centered Maintenance methods minimize unplanned asset downtime, maximize the realistic usable lifetime of equipment, and avoid unnecessary resource burn.

Top Three Benefits of Reliability Centered Maintenance in Healthcare

Let's take a look at a few of the top areas Reliability-Centered Maintenance can improve for Healthcare Facilities or HTM teams.

1. Patient Safety
   • At the core of healthcare operations is the goal of maximizing patient safety, and healthcare facility maintenance is no different. The work that Facilities and Biomed departments perform directly impacts the patient experience, whether positively or negatively. If a critical problem with an asset is overlooked, or a piece of equipment is not properly maintained and fails, this means patients may not be able to get the care they need when they need it. With an RCM model, the goal of optimizing maintenance to ensure critical equipment reliability means prioritizing actions that allow these items – including life-support machines or sterilization equipment – are always functional and ready to be used. 
2. Compliance Management
   • Reliability-Centered Maintenance can support compliance management activities through analysis, thorough documentation, and a system designed to make sure critical assets are up and running as consistently as possible. Incorporating regulatory compliance standards into an RCM strategy keeps departments on top of required schedules while optimizing work that allows for more flexibility in timing. The structured approach of RCM means that necessary documentation is available and the compliance standards set by regulatory bodies are taken into account during more organized day-to-day maintenance activities.
3. Cost Saving
   • One of the most significant benefits of a reliability-focused model is cost efficiency. From asset replacements that may not be necessary yet to asset failures that could have been avoided with proper predictive maintenance, there are plenty of ways that other maintenance models can lead to decreased efficiency in budget spend. With analysis of historical asset data and continuous monitoring of asset condition, RCM models both extends asset lifecycles and cuts out over-maintenance to reach a balance that saves time and resources.

Is RCM the Right Fit for Healthcare?

Determining whether Reliability-Centered Maintenance is the best method for a healthcare facility requires weighing the pros and cons of the model for the unique operations of healthcare maintenance departments, as what works for one facility may not be a good fit for a facility that has slightly different needs or processes.

An RCM model is well-suited for healthcare asset management and maintenance in key areas, like improving patient care with consistently reliable equipment, developing schedules and practices that keep up with regulatory compliance requirements, and saving resources by avoiding unnecessary maintenance activities.

While the potential benefits of an RCM approach for healthcare are clear, it can be challenging to change the way departments operate, making it easier said than done to move toward putting a new model into practice.

Common challenges of implementing Reliability-Centered Maintenance practices:

• Complex Systems: With the volume of equipment in a healthcare facility plus the range of criticality and maintenance needs for each one, analyzing and determining the priority level of assets can be overly complicated. 
• Rapid Change: Healthcare Facilities and HTM departments face constant and fast-paced change in technology. With new developments in equipment and new additions to tool kits, keeping an RCM model current may require more re-evaluation than is practical. 
• Limited Resources: Healthcare maintenance teams are busy! Implementing an RCM strategy requires significant time, analysis, and training that departments may simply not have the ability to fit in around ongoing daily operations. 

At FSI, we believe Reliability-Centered Maintenance is a highly beneficial model when it can be implemented. As we stay dialed in to the ongoing evolution in needs and requirements for the healthcare maintenance industry, a common theme we focus on to guide product development is the concept of doing “less with less,” the idea that teams are facing the need to cut out unnecessary work (less), while optimizing priority work with fewer resources (with less). RCM is one possible approach in accomplishing this aim, allowing organizations to minimize resource burn while improving healthcare maintenance practices on the most essential assets.

Healthcare maintenance software is a crucial piece in the puzzle of developing an RCM strategy. Without detailed and useful historical data or organized inventories, properly analyzing operations to reach an effective plan is impossible. FSI’s CMMS platform and additional solutions have helped organizations like Atrium Health move toward a Reliability-Centered Maintenance model with a focus on standardization and accurate data to fuel strategy.

Reach out to our team for more on how to do “less with less” with FSI.