by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | August 01, 2014
From the August 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
DeGraff went on to explain that when GE partners with hospitals, the answer for improving performance rests in three key operational areas; managing assets, improving patient workflow and workforce utilization. “In this ‘not business as usual’ environment, we are focused on helping our customers improve the financial and operation health of their enterprise,” he says.
And in a turnaround from the direction many hospitals are going— taking more responsibilities in-house — DeGraff says that by enabling facilities to outsource maintenance and management of their clinical engineering services, the company can help to reduce the operating costs associated with clinical assets by 15 to 20 percent.
GE, like most OEMs offering service in today’s highly competitive health care environ, has taken steps to provide parts and service beyond their brand. Although they have a large number of service techs dedicated to servicing GE products, there are also techs covering competitors’ equipment. “GE has more than 1,000 service engineers, trained to work on non-GE equipment,” says DeGraff.
GE maintains a Multi-Vendor Services Center of Excellence in Arlington, Texas that serves as a training facility for those techs. There, techs train on nearly 50 different pieces of equipment installed in the facility, according to DeGraff. “This is in addition to field-based training programs that include many more non-GE systems,” says DeGraff. “The TCOE is also home to a parts repair operation that handles more than 700 repairs each year.”
The techs servicing non-GE imaging equipment have on average more than 20 years of experience on other OEM products and receive an additional 15,000 hours of training annually on non-GE systems. Those techs are well-stocked with parts from GE’s $30 million supply consisting of more than 74,000 unique parts numbers from more than 200 suppliers, stocked in 59 warehouses across the country according to DeGraff.
Yet, it’s not always a question of getting a part to fix a problem. Remote diagnosis of issues along with the possibility for remote repair also factors in or should factor in to the decision a hospital makes about who will service their equipment. According to DeGraff, GE online engineers utilize more than 40,000 broadband connections for more than 50,000 connected systems that ultimately resolve 40 percent of the issues that arise in less than 30 minutes.
GE is also leveraging technology to prevent problems before they occur. The company offers iCenter, a web-based application that provides information on maintenance history and asset utilization by consolidating inventory, planned maintenance compliance and performance comparisons, according to DeGraff. Complimenting that system is On- Watch which monitors and analyzes device performance to help identify any possible red flags before a problem escalates.
