Uniontown Hospital, a 206-bed acute care facility in Uniontown, PA, faced an acute challenge to its equipment asset management strategy: How to further improve results of our highly effective 10-year-old program.Actually, the hospital has saved nearly $500,000 in maintenance expenses since initiating its LIFECYCLE™program in 1993. That’s a yearly savings of 26 percent over our maintenance costs prior to implementing the program with USCS Equipment Technology Solutions® — including $65,000 in just the past year.

With five of our 13 departments participating in the program, we asked USCS to recommend additional products or services to enhance Uniontown’s already successful approach. Those recommendations included more expansive use of two tools already at our disposal, including:

• On-line access to the hospital’s equipment listing, maintenance history, vendor payment status, preventive maintenance information, and program operations. This tool is called Access LIFECYCLE™.

• Real-time engineering service that offers repair assistance, alternate parts and
labor sources, historical reference on equipment and service procedures, and preventive maintenance recommendations. It is called HELP HOTLINE.

In 2002, we implemented the recommendations. Now the managers and staff in participating departments routinely generate reports, using the on-line access for assistance with repair and purchase negotiations. The hospital also has started contacting the real-time engineering service for assistance with purchase planning and for equipment not currently included in the hospital’s program.

When we’re ready to buy new equipment, we call the HELP HOTLINE and ask them to research their database, to see if their customers have experienced any significant issues with a particular manufacturer’s equipment. If there have been issues, I ask the manufacturer to address those before we sign a P.O.

The hospital now has immediate access to equipment costs and uses that information in negotiating repair costs with vendors and even with purchase planning. Recently we generated a report detailing chronic repairs to a gamma camera and approached the vendor with it. There was a chronic problem with the camera despite our paying to have it resolved. We told the vendor they needed to do something about it and that we would also like some money back. The vendor reviewed the history and worked with us to resolve the issues.

Our staff now generates on-line reports that detail repair history on equipment being considered for replacement. We can look at any piece of equipment and see immediately how much money we have spent on repairs. This helps us to determine whether replacement equipment is warranted. The information also helps the hospital determine whether a specific manufacturer should be considered. We used such information recently to evaluate nuclear cameras. Based on the repair history of one of our nuclear cameras and the manufacturer’s inability to fix chronic problems with it, we eliminated the manufacturer from consideration.

We frequently call the engineering service for alternative service and parts sources as well as for negotiating advice. The hospital even uses it for equipment not included in the hospital’s program, such as high-voltage transformers. In June 2002, the hospital purchased two high-voltage transformers from a HELP HOTLINE-recommended source. In the process, we learned that their database is continually being updated. One week they may not have information on a particular item, but the next time they will. In fact, that happened in summer 2003 when we had to replace two tabletops in two radiology rooms.

When the first replacement incident occurred, the engineering service was unable to recommend an alternative source. But a month later, when a second tabletop needed replacement, the service identified a parts source with a refurbished unit for $2,000 vs. the manufacturer’s price of $8,064 — a savings of more than $6,000. A third-party vendor will install the tabletop, saving the hospital an additional $1,000 in labor costs vs. the manufacturer’s installation costs.

In the past year, our active use of both the on-line access service and the real-time engineering service has netted Uniontown Hospital more than $65,000 in savings. And the extra time taken is minimal compared to results. It took just 20 minutes to save $7,000 on a tabletop repair. And it takes only minutes to generate a report with the on-line access service that then can be used to negotiate with vendors for parts, service and even equipment purchases.