Maximizing Asset Use in Healthcare: Simple Strategies for Efficiency

Efficient asset use is a game-changer in healthcare. It’s about getting the most from your equipment, facilities, and staff without sacrificing quality. Why bother? Simple. Better asset use means better patient care, lower costs, and smoother operations. With more tech and patients than ever, smart asset management is essential.

In this post, we’ll go over some of the most effective asset utilization strategies in healthcare and how you can put them to use.

What Is Asset Utilization?

Simply put, asset utilization refers to how a company uses its assets to maximize profit or reach goals. It measures how well an asset is performing compared to how better it could be.

When it comes to healthcare, it’s incredibly important to use assets efficiently. Imagine running a hospital where high-tech equipment and facilities are underused. It’s almost like owning a Ferrari but only driving it in first gear.

By efficiently utilizing your assets, you maximize the use of medical equipment, facilities, and staff, ensuring they deliver value 24/7. For healthcare providers, this also means reduced operational costs while providing better patient care.

More specifically, when assets are optimally used, downtime is minimized, leading to quicker diagnoses and treatments. Moreover, well-calculated asset management can improve patient outcomes by ensuring critical equipment is always available and functioning. 

Overall, if there was a single way to put it, effective asset utilization in healthcare is about being smarter with resources, improving service delivery, and, ultimately, saving lives.

What Are Asset Utilization Ratios?

Asset utilization ratios measure how effectively a company utilizes its assets to generate revenue and profits and improve its service. These provide important insights into a company’s operational efficiency and profitability. 

The following four metrics are used to measure it:

1. Product Yield

This metric calculates the percentage of good-quality products produced against the total number of products planned to be produced. It helps evaluate how efficiently a company’s assets are being used to generate usable output. 

2. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) measures how well a machine or equipment’s output is against its maximum potential. It’s arguably one of the most important metrics for obtaining a picture of productivity. 

The formula to calculate it is: 

OEE = Availability x Performance x Quality

Here’s a clear breakdown:

• Availability: The amount of time an asset is actually functional while accounting for downtimes caused due to maintenance, breakdowns, and other factors.
• Performance: The speed at which an asset performs compared to its maximum potential speed. 
• Quality: Measures the quality of products compared to the total number of products manufactured, accounting for rejects and defective pieces. 

Now, each of these has a formula of their own as well. Here’s a table referring to that:

Metric	Formula
Availability	(Run Time / Planned Production Time) x 100%
Performance	(Ideal Cycle Time x Total Count) / Run Time x 100%
Quality	(Good Product Count / Total Count) x 100%

3. Unplanned Downtime

When optimizing asset utilization, planned downtime is necessary to give the assets a break. However, unplanned downtime is negative and usually occurs due to something unexpected, like a breakdown, malfunction, or lack of stock. This number should be low, as high levels of unplanned downtime indicate ineffective asset management, inventory management, or training.

4. Maintenance Spend

Throughout an asset’s life cycle, it’s natural for your company to incur the cost of planned and unplanned maintenance. However, the maintenance team must analyze which assets require frequent and expensive maintenance. If an asset has a high maintenance cost ratio, it might be time to replace it, phase it out, or perform a thorough repair.

Strategies to Improve Asset Utilization in Healthcare

Asset utilization in healthcare isn’t merely about saving money but also about improving patient care. There are various strategies that can be implemented to optimize the use of medical equipment, infrastructure, and other resources.

Regular Maintenance and Inspections

Establish a preventive maintenance schedule for all your medical equipment to ensure it’s up to the mark. Depending on the type of asset, this could mean routines like regular servicing, software updates, and calibrations.

Regular inspections should be conducted to predict potential issues early on and prevent costly repairs or downtime. You could also consider protecting your assets with maintenance management systems.

Staff Training

Your staff should be trained on proper equipment operations, handling, and maintenance procedures. It’s essential for better operations and lowering waste, so this one just cannot be ignored. 

Here are some tips for better staff training:

• Highlight the importance of using equipment and resources properly.
• Organize hands-on workshops to practice using new tools.
• Keep training materials updated with the latest practices.
• Set clear guidelines and track compliance to ensure accountability.
• Use real-life examples to show how proper asset use improves patient outcomes.
• Encourage open communication for feedback and suggestions.

Leverage Technology

Implementation of technology, such as Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), can be incredibly useful. If you’re wondering what EAM is, It’s a solution that can be applied to optimize the lifecycle of your assets. In addition, solutions like Asset Management System (AMS), and Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) can also be beneficial, as they help track, manage, and optimize the medical equipment and infrastructure throughout their life span.

All of these help you monitor the location, status, history, and other relevant data of your assets. With this data in hand, preventive measures can be taken based on historical records, sensors, patterns, and trends to fix a potential issue before it leads to a breakdown.

We recommend using our asset management tool, LLumin CMMS+. It gives you a centralized database and access to numerous productivity tools to help your healthcare business track a huge number of asset types, entities, and facilities.

Simplify Operations

Simple manufacturing principles can help reduce waste and improve output. They eliminate unnecessary steps, reduce inventory levels, and create a straightforward communication medium between staff members.

With our CMMS+, you can easily track important key performance metrics (KPIs) and identify what’s working and what’s not, which also makes it much easier for the team to make data-driven decisions. 

Plus, for more insight, check out our blog on 10 CMMS KPIs to track and improve for better operations.

Keep Improving

At the end of the day, there’s no one-and-done strategy for the best asset utilization. It requires constant improvement. Regularly reviewing asset utilization metrics and implementing changes increases your chances of attaining higher levels of efficiency. Also, encourage your staff to provide feedback and suggestions for improvement. They can provide valuable insights that may not be immediately apparent, which can prove to be very helpful in the long run.

How to Calculate Asset Utilization in Healthcare

Calculating your asset utilization can take your healthcare company a long way, as it helps you figure out how well or how much you’re leveraging them. 

• Establish Total Available Time: Start by identifying the total amount of time an asset, like equipment, tools, or facility, is available for business use. This is typically measured in terms of a year. 
• Determine Annual Planned Downtime: Gather data on total hours spent on preventive maintenance across all healthcare assets. Also, account for downtime incurred due to staff training, including training on equipment operation and maintenance.
• Track Lost Operations Time: Several factors contribute to lost operations time, such as planned or unplanned leaves for the staff, holidays, weekends, and short staffing. All these factors could contribute to idle time for your assets.
• Track Lost Production Hours: Hours when an asset could have been used productively but was not are considered lost production hours. Using LLumin’s CMMS+ solution, you can identify periods when an asset was available but not in use.
• Notice Loss of Quality: Perfection is unattainable, so several procedures or tests are bound to have to be repeated due to errors and defective manufacturing.
• Identify Actual Asset Utilization: The total available time an asset is productively utilized, considering all the downtime (planned or unplanned) and all the inefficiencies (like reworks) gives you the actual hours of productive equipment use.

Here’s a table containing formulas to calculate all of the above pointers:

Pointer	Formula
Total Available Time	Total Available Time = Number of Working Days in Year x Number of Working Hours per Day
Annual Planned Downtime	Annual Planned Downtime = (Scheduled Maintenance Hours + Scheduled Upgrades/Activities Hours)
Lost Operations Time	Lost Operations Time = (Delays + Idle Time + Non-Productive Periods)
Lost Production Hours	Lost Production Hours = Total Available Time − (Actual Productive Hours + Annual Planned Downtime + Lost Operations Time)
Loss of Quality	Quality Losses = (Rework Hours + Wasted Production Hours)
Actual Asset Utilization	Actual Asset Utilization = (Total Operating Time – Lost Operations Time) / Total Available Time

How LLumin Can Maximize Asset Use in Healthcare

We understand managing healthcare facilities can be challenging. In fact, optimizing asset utilization in this sector is more important than anywhere else. This is not only to increase efficiency and reduce costs but also because better asset utilization can lead to improved patient care. Our AI-powered CMMS+ software is a cloud-based platform offering various capabilities to improve asset utilization and management. 

Here are some of the many things you can do with it:

• Monitor and manage all your medical equipment, tools, and infrastructure. Our system uses RFID tags, GPS tracking, and IoT integration to monitor equipment in real-time.
• Schedule and keep track of preventive maintenance. Our AI-powered software predicts when maintenance is needed, minimizing unexpected downtime and ensuring that critical medical equipment is always available.
• Monitor asset performance and utilization in real time to reduce maintenance costs and prevent losses in the long run.
• Identify and propose solutions for potential problems before they cause downtime.
• Meet federal regulations, safety standards, or compliance requirements, including OSHA, EPA, FDA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and ISO. 

While we’ve helped numerous companies with better asset utilization, Red Cedar Gathering is an incredible example of what our software can do for you. It’s a midstream energy company that “gathers” gas from more than 1,200 wells and delivers it to various interstate transportation pipelines. 

Their concern was machine uptime, lengthy diagnosis and repair cycles, and data exchange between operations and maintenance. Enter LLumin’s CMMS+, they were able to dramatically improve operations uptime by 99%, reduce labor hours and MTTR cycles, and have predictive and proactive maintenance processes in place.

Interested in achieving similar efficiency? Businesses worldwide use LLumin CMMS+ to manage their asset audits better, and you can, too. Request a demo of our software to get started.

Final Thoughts

Asset utilization is important for any industry, but it becomes a NECESSITY for healthcare providers. The more efficient a healthcare facility is, the better it can serve patients and grow from a business perspective while also giving back great medical service to the community.

Knowing how to maximize asset use fully can be daunting, but not with a solution like LLumin’s CMMS+. Our tool can help you utilize your assets much more effectively, creating a win-win situation for your business and the patients.

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