Healthcare is big business. At over 22.5 percent of the gross national product (GNP), healthcare spending continues to rise sharply. This creates tremendous pressure on hospital leaders to optimize the management of their organizations.
In addition, hospitals, at their core, essentially are consumer service organizations. However, failure to provide proper, or even extraordinary service may lead to horrific outcomes for the patient. These two factors; cost management and patient care have led to a widespread industry increase in implementations of various technology solutions, specifically tailored for the Healthcare Industry.
Key among these technology solutions is PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management.
“Oracle's PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) offers a fresh approach by delivering maximum financial control and system flexibility. With a single centralized repository of asset data, PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management becomes the core for all assets and related activities, giving you complete visibility into your assets enterprise-wide.”‡
PeopleSoft has developed this solution which not only maintains the highly complex depreciation schedules required for hundreds of thousands of capital assets, it also tracks maintenance schedules, upgrade requirements, and lowers the cost of use by maximizing up-time. Even more importantly, it provides an accurate tool, which improves the performance and safety of patient facing equipment.
Most hospital departments are responsible for equipment assets that can cost millions, and proper asset management can help them plan effective service, maintenance and replacement around the lifecycle of each device. By tracking medical devices, operating room equipment and even elevators and emergency generators with asset management software that records maintenance schedules and normal operational costs, managers can have a better idea of the condition of each individual piece of equipment, where it’s being used and what its likely lifecycle is.
With this type of detailed information about the hospital’s physical assets, managers can also monitor medical equipment for individual patients, departments and the hospital as a whole to gain leverage on inventory management and resource planning. With established records of inventory fluctuations and known life-spans for existing hospital equipment, managers can effectively forecast trends with a level of detail that isn’t possible without a robust enterprise solution.
At the highest level, the suite of ALM products includes, as excerpted from Oracle’s website:
Maintenance Management
“Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Maintenance Management is a fully integrated solution for the maintenance of infrastructure, plant, and equipment—enabling organizations to streamline operations, facilitate compliance, and eliminate costly, inadequate custom integrations to third-party systems. Through out-of-the-box integration with other PeopleSoft Enterprise applications such as Project Costing, Asset Management, Purchasing, and Inventory, PeopleSoft Maintenance Management enables you to prioritize assets and ensure the right level of investment to meet utilization and financial goals.”
IT Asset Management
“Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise IT Asset Management manages distributed IT assets, including software, servers, laptops, desktops, and PDAs. PeopleSoft IT Asset Management integrates with Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM IT Help Desk to automatically reconcile physical and financial IT inventory, redeploy underutilized software, provide service agents with visibility into actual hardware/software configurations and help divisions meet growing compliance requirements.”
Real Estate Management
“Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Real Estate Management streamlines and automates lease administration and space management. Whether you are a corporate or a retail/franchise operation, PeopleSoft Real Estate Management offers a comprehensive solution for reducing costs and minimizing contractual and financial risk.”
In late 2013, new regulations and standards for medical equipment maintenance were established by The Joint Commission (TJC), which aligns TJC's accreditation with updated regulations from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The new regulations mandate substantial changes in the ways hospitals manage medical equipment. These new requirements mean hospital administrators will spend considerably more time, money and staff to maintain their facility's medical equipment. Failure to do so could result in unfavorable JCAHO (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations) and even more importantly significant liability concerns regarding patient safety.
From a financial perspective, as hospitals are becoming more attentive to effective cost management than ever before, obtaining and allocating accurate depreciation allowances is a critical function. But as a hospitals primary mission is the improvement of the quality of health for its patients and its community, Asset Management takes on a new role of the maintenance of the care environment which has a direct impact on the well-being of patients and their health outcomes.
PeopleSoft ALM is a robust solution that provides healthcare institutions with the ability to effectively manage their assets and facilities for fiscal depreciation, cost control and patient safety. It’s the logical centerpiece to an integrated facilities solution and is the perfect complement to your PeopleSoft HCM, Financials, and Supply Chain solution.