Automation helps to meet Joint Commission documentation requirement

A computerized management maintenance system makes tracking and reporting work orders and other jobs more efficient.

Troy Isaacson knew that Republic County Hospital, Belleville, Kan., and the long-term care facility attached to it were long overdue for a new automated maintenance management system.

The previous system required writing and filing handwritten work-order requests that ended up in an office envelope after the jobs were completed. The internally designed database system had severe limitations. As a result, communication within the department and with other hospital departments was inadequate and inefficient.

“We lacked any real tracking or reporting capabilities,” says Isaacson, who serves as maintenance supervisor, safety officer and project manager.

To automate the maintenance department’s communication and documentation procedures, he started shopping for a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), eventually selecting FacillityDude’s MaintenanceEdge, a Web-based software program.

The product fulfills a variety of reporting, tracking and scheduling needs, but also provides detailed documentation on maintenance of clinical equipment and devices, which meets a Joint Commission requirement, he says.

“It provides an overview of the department and helps us to prioritize our day better. It also allows us to track and manage our preventive maintenance work and incorporate it into our work requests,” Isaacson adds.

MaintenanceEdge includes Work Order and Planned Maintenance modules. Work Order enables users to receive and assign work requests, schedule and manage maintenance for technicians or vendors, automatically record labor and purchase transactions, and access data through built-in performance reports.

Planned Maintenance helps the maintenance department to create daily, weekly, monthly and annual maintenance schedules and integrates with the Work Order module to create more accurate workload forecasts.

The CMMS has made staff scheduling much more precise, Isaacson explains. “We can schedule or estimate start times for work orders connected to a project and people can see when they are needed via their dashboard so they can better plan their workload,” he says.

To better understand how and where staff are allocated on a daily basis, Isaacson devised a way to capture how staff members spend their time as close to 100 percent as possible, which leads to the system’s budgetary benefits.

“If you put labor hours on work orders, then the system totals it for you,” he says. “Reports can show if we were on budget or over budget, and we can make decisions midproject.”

The system also has helped to improve communication with other departments regarding expediting their work order requests. “Now, instead of wondering why something isn’t fixed, they can look it up and see the status,” he says.

In the event a Joint Commission surveyor visits Republic, thorough documentation of equipment maintenance is readily available, an invaluable benefit of the CMMS.

“The system has helped us to better manage our assets and take better care of our buildings. It gives us a clear view of our responsibilities and where time and money are spent, so we know where our budget should be focused,” Isaacson says. 

Compliance challenge

HOSPITAL // Republic County Hospital, Belleville, Kan.

NEED // Documenting maintenance of clinical equipment to meet Joint Commission requirements

SOLUTION // FacilityDude online CMMS