Within the healthcare industry, as with many other industries, a growing pressure exists to balance priorities and needs within increasingly limited budget constraints. The demand to simultaneously manage both operational and clinical needs requires significant effort for every system or facility. Balancing conflicting priorities can be compounded during extreme times, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Many healthcare facilities and equipment are increasingly becoming more advanced and providing organizations with additional data every day. These advancements should help healthcare systems and facilities make strategic decisions, but often organizations are finding themselves in a situation of being data rich but lacking the insights needed to take action. These strategic decisions, such as the optimization of capital investment to support major equipment overhaul or replacement, often need enhanced data rather than just a sheer collection of numbers to inform next steps.
For a healthcare system or facility to remain at the forefront of medical care and advancement, it is critical that the data available from the existing machines and systems be used to support strategic business decisions. Every organization has a finite amount of capital budget to split across expansion, innovation, research, development and ongoing upkeep of existing assets and facilities. If an organization needs to make a major investment in innovative equipment or new facilities, it is critical to understand the existing condition and overall capital requirements already needed for current assets and systems. Harnessing this information allows organizations to strike the delicate balance between maintaining existing facilities and growing or expanding into new capabilities, within set budget constraints.
Many organizations use or are starting to use their data to make operational or day-to-day decisions to help with maintenance expenditures and critical equipment reliability. However, when strategic capital investment decisions are made, this actionable information is often not readily available or used. This leads to a significant risk of investing capital for existing facilities in the wrong location, potentially resulting in major equipment failure or the need to significantly adjust or supplement capital investment budgets yearly. For even a small healthcare organization, this can result in millions of dollars of changes and overruns each year and can significantly inhibit an organization’s ability to invest in other critical parts of the business.
The ability to harness the significant amount of data available within a healthcare organization, to make efficient and effective decisions, should be a key focus. The ability to capture this potential and make strategic decisions requires a flexible mindset to change the way things have traditionally been completed. Available data will need to be supplemented with industry partners’ information and solutions to facilitate changing decisions and activities within an organization.
A data-driven software solution can help an organization enhance data to identify actionable information. AssetLens is a technology that can provide an organization with a tool needed to take the next step in making more effective capital expenditure decisions. The tool aggregates many disparate data sources and enriches the information based on specialized subject matter expert experience. Such actionable information provides an organization with the processed data needed to make more effective strategic business decisions.
With a turnkey, cloud-based platform, stakeholders have the tools to make effective choices for capital budgets. AssetLens can help you harness data to make strategic decisions for your healthcare system or facility.