3 Ways to Secure Your Medical Facility

Medical facilities are a gift to many. Doctors and nurses work tirelessly to save the lives of patients. However, actually maintaining a working medical environment is complicated and full of potential pitfalls. These problems only worsen the already immense burden placed upon medical professionals. Luckily, there are a few pivotal changes you can make to your hospital that will keep things operational and efficient.

Electrical Needs

The most crucial element of modern medicine is the many tools doctors and nurses use to monitor and treat their patients. This presents a problem, because electricity is a notoriously finicky utility that’s prone to a variety of failures. Between a faulty fuse, inclement weather, and damaged parts, your hospital can and will lose power at inopportune moments. First and foremost, this means that your building’s wiring needs to be immaculate to ensure a minimal risk of a fuse blowing, for example. However, many potential electrical problems will be outside of your control, so you’ll need a generator with a generator interlock kit in order to ensure that your facility has electricity at all times. A generator requires fuel, however, meaning that longer outages will necessitate an ample stock of gasoline. Solar is also a viable option for keeping a hospital running. However, the limitations of solar are even greater without the addition of a solar panel battery and enough panels to generate a surplus of energy to store in that battery. For a business that’s open 24/7 like a hospital, this is a necessity, regardless, although it’s that much worse when you depend on a hybrid electrical setup and lose access to one of your power sources.

Inventory Management

Another important component of any medical facility is its stockpile of various medical supplies. From guaze to latex gloves, hospitals use a lot of disposable medical tools. For example, it’s widely accepted that needles need to be discarded outright after a single use to prevent any potential cross contamination between patients. Those needles have to come from somewhere, so working with suppliers to create a strong supply chain is essential for keeping a hospital going. Finding the right supplies is a matter of doing your homework. Investigating the options available in your area is a good start, and a thorough search can help you find better prices and more reliable service. However, the distributors will do you little good without your own active participation. A supplier can only be as good as the client, because it takes a keen eye and a called shot to order the products you’ll need before your own supply runs out. Keeping an eye on your inventory as it diminishes, you can extrapolate your use for the immediate future, allowing you to predict when you’ll run out so that you can restock before it’s too late.

Clerical Optimization

It may surprise you to know that all of those wait times at a doctor’s office or an emergency room are not simply an inconvenience to patients. In fact, a major contributor to those long waits is the amount of paperwork that doctors and nurses have to contend with on a daily basis. Hospital records need a ton of information, including a laundry list of data points such as patients’ vitals, as well as their insurance information, date of birth, and more. The process of collecting all of this datas slows hospitals down tremendously. However, implementing IoT technology, you can optimize and even automate a variety of clerical processes. Most notably, IoT medical equipment can broadcast patients’ vitals directly to a cloud storage database in order to save doctors and nurses the time and legwork involved in collecting it in person. By simplifying the paperwork load, you can give your doctors and nurses more time to tend to patients, leading to more diagnoses and more effective treatment.

Running a hospital is an exercise in willpower. There’s a lot working against medical professionals and hospital management, but these tips can help.

Exclusive Article by Lindsey Patterson at Emrindustry