Running a senior care facility means you are well aware of the maintenance difficulties involved in keeping it safe. Your top priority is to offer your residents a secure, useful, and effective living environment that maximizes their comfort and quality of life.
Many people are dependent on you to provide support around-the-clock. When anything malfunctions, it causes more damage than just an industrial machine that slows down product production. Your residents’ lives could be at risk.
Senior Care Maintenance
With the growing influx of our aging population, it’s imperative for senior care facilities to run smoothly, and efficiently and keep assets in good operating condition.
With the new health facility regulations, senior facilities have stricter guidelines that they must meet while working with a limited staff to focus on patients. Gone are the days of
- Using paper or spreadsheets to manage work orders.
- Inefficient work order tracking with things slipping through the cracks.
- The challenge of pulling and compiling reports from multiple resources.
- Struggles in capital planning due to the lack of reliable asset management information.
Today, senior facilities are investing in computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software. CMMS is helping them to better manage their facilities, giving them the ability to automate processes so that they can tend to their patients.
Importance Of Senior Care\Assisted Living Maintenance
A senior living home needs to be maintained in more ways than just making sure the equipment is operational. That equipment is essential to the lives and livelihoods of the residents, thus it’s critical that your maintenance department functions effectively. There will always be something that requires repair, including administrative offices, emergency generators, and kitchen equipment.
Computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software is designed to address these maintenance issues that these facilities face today, and even more.
What Is CMMS Software?
Computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is a software program that makes it easier to maintain medical facilities and equipment. It keeps important assets safe so they are available when patients need them, and even tracks the maintenance schedule for devices already being used by patients.
In order to ensure proper maintenance at all times, a CMMS automatically distributes work orders in real time. Additionally, it serves as a central database, collecting all standard operating procedures (SOPs), purchase dates, and warranty information.
Work Orders
CMMS replaces the cumbersome manual work order maintenance process with automation. A digital workflow allows employees to request repairs quickly and efficiently through a customized web portal. This digital system not only speeds up maintenance requests and work order executions but also creates an easily accessed history for maintenance records.
A digital system provides triggered notifications, such as sending out emails immediately once a work order is inputted, drip-down reminders and tracking actions, and duplicate checking to avoid double orders. For example, you can set up an automated work order scheduling someone to check on the heating equipment, and someone on your maintenance team will be getting the notification every time it needs to be done.
Prolong The Lifespan Of Assets
With our asset management module, you can keep a record of important details about your equipment, such as the make, the date it was installed, and all maintenance performed on it. You can keep track of the expected lifespan, which will give you a useful heads-up when something has to be replaced.
Keeping track of equipment expenses will be much easier now that everything is in one centralized system. You don’t need to sift through drawers, file cabinets, and old documents.
Preventive Maintenance Prolongs Asset Lifespan
Preventive maintenance helps you to identify and address potential maintenance problems before they happen. This differs from reactive maintenance, which addresses a problem after it has occurred, and usually results in unnecessary expenses in rush shipping of parts, system downtime, and employee overtime to fix the issue, among other unexpected costs.
CMMS gives facilities managers the tools to track timelines for when assets need to be taken offline for maintenance, so they can schedule replacements or otherwise accommodate the short-term asset loss.
Investing in a preventive maintenance program, will save you a lot of time and money For instance, there is a chance that equipment could break unexpectedly if a staff person does not keep a regular check on routine issues. This could result in higher repair expenditures for you than would otherwise be necessary if an effective preventive equipment
By performing preventative maintenance, you can identify any equipment flaws before they disrupt your business operations. Implementing CMMS can save time and money while protecting assets, ensuring they have the longest possible life, and maintaining optimal operation.
Optimize Employee Work Time
Some businesses give their employee’s paper maintenance work orders, which they store in a file cabinet or drawer when they’re finished. There is no way to determine who was assigned to a work order, how effectively they perform the tasks, if it was completed and how long it took to complete. This results in ineffective equipment maintenance and makes it difficult to recognize and reward employees based on their performance or inspire staff members who struggled to complete work orders.
Using maintenance management software like CMMS saves you from the hassle of weeding through numerous bits of paper, stacks of old files,s and spreadsheets that may not be up-to-date. Using a customized dashboard or one of our hundreds of reports, you can quickly determine the status of your work orders. Using the many options, you can filter out completed and pending work orders and keep track of key metrics with user-friendly graphs and insights that help you scale productivity, overtime, costs incurred, and date of service completion. All of this is in one centralized system.
Mobile – Manage Work Orders From Anywhere
In any senior facility almost all of the equipment, including many of the patient beds, is mobile. It’s difficult to keep track of everything when there’s so much equipment frequently being moved around. How is a maintenance tech supposed to know the repair history of a piece of equipment? CMMS stores your information in a centralized system, entering or scanning a barcode scan, techs can instantly access an asset’s critical data, including all the currently open PMs and on-demand work orders for a computer, Smartphone, or mobile device.
Improve Compliance
Regular maintenance tasks are necessary to keep a senior care facility safe, effective, and compliant. Using a CMMS, you can also avoid a significant amount of time and paperwork required for audits and inspections. Create reports that highlight maintenance procedures to show that your company is in compliance with regulations and avoid facing severe penalties. Our software provides you with access to hundreds of reports that extract your data in real-time to provide you with the data you need to satisfy your compliance requirements.
Maximize Budgets
In addition to tracking maintenance expenditures, a CMMS automatically creates budget reports detailing how much the senior facility spends on maintenance, labor, and parts. Future budgeting decisions can be made more effectively by understanding how much each department actually spends on maintenance operations. The senior facility can optimize spending across all departments, eliminating waste while ensuring departments have what they need to be successful.
Happier Residents Through Better Maintenance
With a CMMS you’ll spend less time dealing with unhappy residents because you won’t need to worry about your maintenance operations giving you more time to concentrate on your residents.
Investing in a quality maintenance system will result in happier residents. Happier residents will leave better reviews and result in higher resident retention. Positive reviews and resident retention lead to increased revenue.
If you’d like to learn more about how to use CMMS to save money and take your equipment maintenance software to the next level, feel free to contact us to speak with one of our account managers and schedule a free demo.
