Manage Equipment Maintenance and Purchases with Technology

Jinesh Patel, Co-Founder and CEO of UptimeHealth, began his career working as a Clinical Engineering Manager for a large health system in Austin, Texas, managing the medical equipment for 13 hospitals and a number of outpatient ambulatory sites. He had a substantial budget, a team of technicians, and over 100,000 medical devices to keep track of.

“My job was figuring out how to decrease the cost of ownership of our devices while keeping the quality of those devices high,” he recalls. Within a year, he was the first person to take his department into the black by using data to identify better cost-saving strategies, which he says no one had been able to do before.

“Our work-order management platform had a list of the equipment we owned, the failure rates, service cost breakdowns, and more” he says. “I realized I could start utilizing that data differently. I wanted to predict which devices were operationally burdensome—not just to the clinic, but also to my team—because they failed so often.”

These data points allowed Patel to identify the shelf life of the equipment, and at what age it no longer made sense to own it. He was then able to create a proactive replacement policy based on devices with higher failure rates, expensive part replacements, or anything that could be tied down to an age-specific problem. He also used the data to identify the ideal locations where his skilled technicians should be positioned based on proximity to high-demand areas to reduce time wasted on travel. “These data points currently existed in different silos, and people weren’t able to make informed equipment decisions,” he says. “So, I created my own formula to figure it out.”

Coming up with the idea

Patel came up with the idea for UptimeHealth when he saw an urgent care facility being built across the street. “I thought, ‘that’s a tiny office, but it has medical devices similar to large hospitals. Those devices still need maintenance and compliance programs to keep them from breaking down. I wondered who manages it for somebody that small?’” So, Patel just walked across the street and asked the question.

They told him if a piece of equipment broke, they called the manufacturer or whoever sold them the device. Patel explained they could reduce failure rates if they conducted monthly or quarterly maintenance and offered to help them. He decided to ask his father, who is a physician, and some of his colleagues who owned their own practices the same question and got the same answer. That was his AHA! moment.

“They all operated with a break/fix mentality,” Patel says. He soon realized this would be consistent for any medical provider that does not have in-house equipment management support. “It was a bigger problem than I initially thought existed,” he recalls. “And I knew somebody had to solve it if people were going to rely more on outpatient care in the future.” Patel decided to create and automate a process like the one he had used at his health system but make it simple enough for the average practice owner or staff member to use.

“So that was the initial thesis of UptimeHealth,” he explains.

The genesis of the program

First, Patel needed to identify exactly how these facilities operated. He wanted to know who was currently in charge of the equipment and their process when things broke down. He was also interested in what they were doing to keep things from breaking down, and how they managed equipment warranties.

SPONSORED

Altius Dental Drives Value and Creates Better Patient Experiences With Weave Challenge: Ensuring the quality of the patient experience and keeping schedules full across 25+ locations, without actionable data and analytics

He decided the first step to building the tool was to help organizations create an accurate asset inventory list. To his surprise, most of the facilities did not have an up-to-date list. “How are you able to measure and monitor the effectiveness of the equipment without knowing exactly what you own?” he asked. The second step was creating a tool to assign maintenance tasks, based on the equipment list, to staff members to ensure they were following the program.

“For example, to maintain a sterilizer, there are certain weekly, monthly, and yearly tasks, such as spore samples, calibrations, cleanings, preventive maintenance visits from your service vendor, proactively replacing gaskets, and more. It’s important to understand what those tasks are and have an accurate log of when they are happening.”

The final step was to connect each device to an assigned technician. This way, if something breaks, the platform can dispatch the technician, track progress, and store the appropriate service history data, which can later be used for decision making.

Creating the software

Next, Patel needed to find an expert in building software. Enter his Co-Founder, Bill Olsen, former CTO of Accruent, the largest asset management software vendor for health systems.

When they met, Olsen told him he’d been looking for companies like the one Patel was ideating to buy while working at Accruent. “He knew that it didn’t exist because he had actively searched for it,” Patel says. “We decided at that moment to build it together.”

Founded in 2018, UptimeHealth initially targeted the urgent care and surgical center space. “We launched the market-ready product at the tail end of 2019,” Patel says. “People were signing up and we were doubling every month. But in March 2020, the pandemic hit, and things started changing.”

Like most companies, the clinics had other concerns and higher priorities than becoming more efficient with equipment management. “We had to pause our growth initiatives,” Patel recalls. “But we continued to work side by side with our current clients to learn more, increase our functionality, and improve on our software.

When things started to calm down mid-2021, Patel and Olsen reevaluated their market strategy. “It turned out the dental industry could really benefit from our services,” he says. “People had been telling us that we should look into dentistry when we started pitching our idea. We didn’t know how to speak their language or the mechanics of the profession, so at the time we didn’t think it was a good initial market.”

However, with all the data pointing in that direction and people advising them to talk to DSOs, they did. Once they heard their platform was what DSOs and large dental groups had been needing for a long time, they realized they were meant to be in the dental market.

SPONSORED

Guide Your Patients to the Right Care Overjet helps you drive transformational clinical & operational improvements across your locations — increasing precision, improving patient care, increasing case acceptance rate, delivering actionable insights, and automating administrative tasks & audits.

Analyzing the industry

“DSOs have many devices scattered over multiple locations, and most of them don’t have an accurate log of what they own,” Patel points out. “Every person to date has said they do not have an equipment roster they can trust. Plus, even if there is a manager, he or she can’t physically be everywhere every day.”

With UptimeHealth, DSOs can keep an organized inventory and create an automated maintenance management program to ensure equipment is being serviced correctly.
“We understand that patients really are cared for by a combination of the provider and the equipment they use,” Patel says. “So, our goal is to make sure you have the best quality equipment when you use it. Often, machines get ignored in that equation.”

Bridging communication gaps

Although in dentistry, relationships with vendors and suppliers are well established, Patel could see that breakdowns in communication still sometimes occur during the repair process. Offices are relying on local managers calling, texting, or emailing technicians for updates. Lack of timely and/or appropriate responses cost both sides time and money.

Patel realized that if UptimeHealth partnered with service groups and distributors by integrating with their work-order ticketing system, it would eliminate the pitfalls and inefficiencies created by inadequate communication between a practice and a vendor. For example, if a ticket was opened in UptimeHealth’s portal, it would open a ticket in the appropriate distributor’s portal. As the technicians update their status and add notes to their existing software, UptimeHealth’s software would be able to relay and store that information so everyone knew what was happening in real time.

“We’re providing that transparency and simplicity,” he continues. “It helps the technicians and the providers and saves everyone time. No one’s waiting for an update. Everyone can see it. And we’re vendor agnostic, so it doesn’t matter who you’re working with.”

Once the work orders are flowing through the UptimeHealth system, the data gathered will be used to create predictive analytics. Clients will then know when their equipment needs to be replaced instead of repaired, which will help with budgeting and forecasting for capital expenditures.

UptimeHealth is actively onboarding major DSOs and is in conversations to integrate with the large and small service vendors that support them. “We’re working with a number of DSOs and are excited about how quickly more are coming on board,” Patel says.

Documenting and improving efficiencies in compliance

UptimeHealth’s platform also generates tasks and reports for managers. “For example, you’re supposed to do a biological sample every week for your sterilizer. Someone must physically do that, send it to a lab, and document the results. Our system can be used to track those processes. When they close it out, it automatically timestamps, dates, and saves the data along with notes and uploaded photos. A manager in charge of multiple locations can easily and virtually manage and track progress across their entire ecosystem.”

“Since it directly affects patient care, equipment management should be a priority in the business,” Patel says. “Our tools can really turnkey most of those efforts.”

SPONSORED

The 5 Minute Organizational Makeover Most dental practices are wasting an enormous amount of time and money on disorganized materials. Color Method™ will rescue your team from clinical clutter and disorganization.

Improving buying power

UptimeHealth uses the data it collects within the system to predict and suggest when it is time to replace equipment based on its cost of ownership. If the procurement managers have an accurate “replace or watch” list of equipment, they can assess their entire network in one spot and determine what equipment they will need to purchase, base budgets accordingly, and generate economies of scale. For example, if they will need five new sterilizers, four new chairs, and two new compressors, they can bulk them all into a single purchase and negotiate the cost down to get more favorable pricing. “The data gives them purchasing power,” Patel says. “This allows DSOs to also be proactively identifying and getting rid of problematic equipment before it causes any issues.”

Final words

UptimeHealth has broader applications than the existing tools DSOs are currently using, according to Patel. “Currently, our main competition is Excel and status quo mentality,” Patel says. “Excel obviously is great, but it doesn’t offer automation in terms of alerts for people to do tasks or track information. We are the first people in the market to come up with something like this.”

“My biggest message is, as DSOs grow, people are going to want innovative tools that automate routine tasks,” he continues. “We are building our product with DSOs in mind and by our side.”

More from the Newsletter

• Overjet Partners with Dental Care Alliance, Providing AI to Improve Patient Outcomes
• Lifelike “child” robot helps train pediatric dentists
• Composite 3D printing of biomimetic human teeth
• Videa Caries Assist Receives FDA 510(k) Clearance

About Jinesh Patel