Austin, Texas-based Accruent announces that Franciscan Health, an integrated healthcare system located in the Midwestern United States, has chosen Accruent’s Connectiv healthcare technology management software to manage its facilities and biomedical assets and devices at 12 hospitals across Indiana and Illinois. Franciscan Health will use Connectiv to manage more than 60,000 pieces of biomedical equipment and more than 30,000 assets in its facilities department.

According to Moody’s, 30% of US hospitals are operating with negative margins. The economics of healthcare continue to pressure providers. Generating cost savings, increasing productivity, and improving efficiency have never been more critical. Franciscan Health selected Connectiv to help retain its strong financial position.

For Franciscan Health, maximizing the value of its asset lifecycle meant bringing facilities management (HFM) and technology management (HTM) at all its facilities onto a single platform built on ServiceNow, the healthcare system’s current IT service management solution. 

Prior to selecting Connectiv, Franciscan Health faced asset management challenges arising from the fact that its hospitals ran on several different management systems that did not share data with one another. These disparate systems reduced flexibility in the creation of work orders and prevented Franciscan Health from employing (alternative equipment maintenance, or AEM) programs as desired. In addition, numerous systems required Franciscan Health to monitor multiple dashboards to manage assets and service teams and meant that it needed to employ multiple processes to locate equipment within its facilities.

Connectiv is designed specifically to help healthcare organizations manage the full lifecycle of medical devices, equipment, and service across the continuum of care. Connectiv brings HFM and HTM into a single system to help hospitals and clinics maximize the return on investments. Connectiv is built on the ServiceNow platform, enabling users to create workflows that automate the process of extracting valuable operational data.

Among the key capabilities that Franciscan Health seeks to obtain from Connectiv are:

  • Visibility into inventories and service processes, including which maintenance issues are having the greatest impact on the organization
  • Improved asset lifecycle data, including acquisition costs and detailed data on the number and cost of work orders
  • Gains in efficiency based on benchmarked metrics for continuous improvement programs
  • Adding up to 70% of inventory to AEM programs
  • Creating a single dashboard for all HTM and HFM information across all its hospitals

“Franciscan Health decided internally that we had to move forward with a modern solution that would consolidate disparate HTM and HFM systems and databases and allow us to manage all 12 hospitals in one system,” says Karen Waninger, corporate administrator of clinical engineering, Franciscan Alliance. “We are looking to Accruent to give us a more consistent mechanism to capture service cost and equipment acquisition value, help us implement AEM programs, and develop standard nomenclatures and work order metrics that give us better information to manage our assets.”