In a healthcare facility, there will always be assets that staff cannot find when it comes time to perform scheduled maintenance. While this is a common experience, not having a defined process for follow up and documentation of missing assets has negative impacts to satisfying regulatory compliance reporting for Healthcare Technology Management teams.
In our recent webinar, Kevin Lund, Solutions Engineer, and Mike Zimmer, Solutions Engineering Manager at FSI, covered the essentials of developing and implementing an “Unable to Locate” (UtL) asset strategy, ways to leverage technology in the process, and how a UtL strategy supports compliance-related goals.
Navigating Code Language
Reporting on preventive maintenance (PM) completion percentage is required for regulatory compliance. When equipment goes missing and preventive maintenance cannot be performed, this pulls a facility further away from the 100% completion rate needed to remain compliant.
According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), assets that can't be found can be excluded from PM completion reporting, but how this isolation and exclusion is achieved is left up to each facility to determine.
Developing a Strategy
An effective strategy includes established steps for attempting to locate the missing asset, thorough documentation guidelines to support future reporting, and prompt communication.
When an asset is due for PM but can’t be found, there should be a set number of attempts to locate it. What this number looks like may differ depending on a department’s staffing and requirements, but two or three search attempts is common practice. With each attempt, the PM work order (and subsequent work orders) should be updated with an “Unable to Locate” asset status, notes documenting search effort, and a rescheduled date to search again.
Depending on if the asset is found or not during these follow up measures, it can be PMed and reintroduced to the inventory or designated as inactive so no further PM procedures will be generated. Throughout the process, the department that owns the asset should be kept in the loop on what’s missing.
Implementing and Tracking with Technology
Developing a process is a great start, but it must be enforced and managed long-term to ensure success and accurate reporting.
Leveraging a CMMS can make the process more efficient and easier to manage. Taking advantage of features like workflow automations in FSI’s CMMS can help streamline the process. Automations can populate statuses and notes, cutting down on time needed for data entry and reducing errors or inaccuracies for better results at reporting time.
A benefit of a healthcare-specific CMMS is the ability to utilize dashboards to keep track of what’s missing – technicians are presented with a proactive view of assets that can’t be found.
Biomed and HTM professionals can use documentation settings and tools that make the most sense for their unique department and system, with the goal of making it as straightforward as possible to know exactly what hasn’t been found and what efforts have gone into searching.
Understanding Downstream Impacts
When it’s time to prove compliance, a thorough “Unable to Locate” asset strategy should result in the ability to use prebuilt reporting tools in a CMMS to easily exclude missing assets based on their “Unable to Locate” status. Excluding these assets from PM completion reporting means missing assets won’t negatively impact PM completion percentages, getting a facility closer to 100% completion.
On top of compliance reporting benefits, an organized “Unable to Locate” strategy supports a more accurate inventory with detailed records on anything that can’t be found and the efforts to locate it. This helps to guide any further follow-up or replacements needed and serves as a historical reference if questions about missing assets arise.
Ready to support compliance with an “Unable to Locate” asset strategy? Reach out here to request our starting guide to developing your own or a copy of the webinar recording!