by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | August 12, 2016
From the August 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Sodexo, a longtime provider of asset management services, also goes well beyond equipment repair and maintenance, to include capital planning as well as benchmarking against similarly situated hospitals. “Our customers are looking for something beyond repair and maintenance,” says Steve Cannon, a senior vice president at Sodexo. “They’re looking to take their programs to the next level. We’re helping them from a technology assessment side.”
Benchmarking may include, for example, a children’s hospital looking at the number of IV pumps it has, compared to a similarly sized or similarly situated facility. Sodexo has its own customer database and compares that against industry benchmarks.
A fit for every client
An asset management program generally isn’t one size fits all, and companies can work with a facility to include in-house biomedical engineering departments in the arrangement. “We have clients where the in-house departments take care of general biomedical patient care equipment and we cover the more sophisticated imaging and cardiology technology,”
says Morford of RENOVO.
“Not every program is fully managed.” Staffing arrangements differ by facility. In a managed equipment services (MES) partnership, such as the kind that Siemens has in place with the William Osler Health System, the company has an on-site team that includes an operations manager, who manages day-to-day operations on the assets; two support coordinators, who make rounds on the equipment and contact the OEMs; a clinical engagement lead, who provides change management throughout the procurement process; and an implementation manager, who manages installation and training. They are Siemens employees who become part of the hospital’s team.
Under an agreement with The Remi Group, if the company finds that a hospital’s in-house biomedical engineers are qualified to perform repairs on equipment placed on its program, the company pays the hospital for the work completed by its in-house staff.
With Sodexo, in most cases, the in-house biomedical group transitions to Sodexo and those workers become Sodexo employees. “We work with each client to determine the best staffing model for their respective goals and objectives,” says Cannon of Sodexo. “In most cases, we have biomedical engineers that are part of our team in almost every client location.”
Aside from its executive and senior management teams, asset management companies also employ back office staff, including accounting, information technology, human resources, sales and marketing.
