Glassbeam Relief for Healthcare Industry Amid COVID-19 Crisis

The world has turned upside down in the last 30 days. I share the experience of the real-life impact of the crisis at Silicon Valley, specifically in Santa Clara County, which has become the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis in California.

The hardest hit is the healthcare facilities across the nation. In a war, the first line of defense is the ground troops at the border. In this war against the COVID-19 pandemic, our first line of defense is the finite sets of hospital equipment such as ventilators, patient beds, digital X-ray machines, and CT Scanners.

The first responders who get the emergency calls tend to also be the ones who get exposed to the virus on the ground. The next in line are the technicians who have the prime and critical responsibility to keep the CT Scanners and Digital X-ray rooms running and are potential candidates for exposure to COVID.

On the other side, capacity overload is becoming a daily reality, for instance, the number of chest X-rays examinations has grown tremendously in the past few weeks as it is one of the primary diagnostic tools for detecting the virus in the affected patient.

All of this complicates and disrupts the management and maintenance of the equipment efficiently and as a result, the imaging machinery has become the focus for hospitals to optimize the facilities so that maximum patients can be accommodated with the limited set of equipment available to continuously deliver the diagnostic services.

Under such unprecedented challenges, radiology equipment is expected to be running at full efficiency with minimal unplanned downtime. The technicians also have to keep a close tab on granular utilization data per machine and facility to optimize patient workflows and balance out investments on procuring new equipment based on the expected patient overflow projected in this crisis.

We believe Glassbeam can help in providing a data-driven decision app and is the best way to get through these challenging times. Our cloud-based analytics app Clinsights™, adopted by more than 150 healthcare facilities across the United States, provides one of the most important features that all healthcare providers need to get answers to critical questions that matter to radiology and biomedical units during this ongoing crisis.

For instance, with restricted travel policies in place, a biomedical engineer will need to remotely log in and manage imaging assets to assess the health of the machine prior to traveling on-site.  We call this “on-site to on-line” strategy.  The remote diagnostics features of Clinsights are part of our Premium Service Analytics solution offering. Read more on this feature in the ‘On-site to On-line blog’ here.

Even before the need for remote login should arise, Glassbeam Clinsights sends out proactive and predictive alerts from its rich notification engine running in the cloud.  The analysis is powered by over Service Analytics.

We make the vision of predictive maintenance real. We allow the staff to get alerted on a potential problem, do a remote login to the machine (with operator approval), perform remote diagnostics, prepare a pre-flight checklist, and then make a trip in person with the right part and game plan to fix the problem. The result is minimized travel and reduced exposure to any virus infection. With this approach, you also push unplanned downtime to planned maintenance windows, and increase machine uptime and improve the quality of patient care.

For Radiology groups, Glassbeam provides granular dashboards, in real-time, on asset utilization by different facilities, modalities, OEM models, operators, and exam types.

Imagine a healthcare network with five facilities and a fleet of 30 Digital X-ray units and 15 CT Scanners equipped to handle 100 patients per day. With the COVID-19 crisis, the same facility may now have to plan 200-300 patients per day for the next 90 days. Before doubling the infrastructure, it will be super important for the Radiology department to ascertain the actual utilization of each facility by machine and exam type over the last 90 days.

Glassbeam can help provide access to pertinent insights to think quickly and act fast for the entire radiology and biomedical department. By signing into our cloud-based Clinsights™ app, your staff can get access on any device, desktop, mobile or tablet. Deriving insights from these dashboards, the operations management staff can optimize scheduling and load balance upcoming demand on these resources by new patients.

There are a couple of blogs to provide more in-depth reading on our Utilization Analytics solution:

Blog 1: Three Questions You Should Ask About Your Radiology Equipment Utilization

Blog 2: Examination Analytics that Optimizes Imaging Facility Operations

There are a lot more actionable insights that Glassbeam analytics can provide to help healthcare providers in this crisis. As a way to help the healthcare industry, we are offering a free 60-day trial of our Clinsights app to any facility across the United States.

Here’s how you can get the 60-day free access to our Clinsights software. Click the button below and enter your business email ID, and one of our representatives will get in touch with you to get started in no time.

Stay tuned for more updates.  Meanwhile, let us know if you have any comments or feedback on this blog.