Onsite To Online — Save Operational Costs And Improve Patient Care

Our mission at Glassbeam is to equip our customers with the ability to predict equipment failures. Prevention is better than cure after all. And there’s that added incentive of saving dollars by proactive maintenance rather than adhoc, reactive ways.

The ground reality, however, is that not all incidents can be prevented. So what does a field service engineer do if they need to immediately react to a high priority incident?

Until now, for instance, third-party medical equipment service organizations had to resort to sending service engineers to the site. This stark reality exists even at in-house service departments of centrally managed healthcare provider networks. This is a costly affair both for the service provider as well as their client.

Here are the top 5 areas where costs can be contained when doing a ‘truck roll’:

• Travel time
• Travel/flight costs
• Unproductive technologist hoursReduced patient throughput
• Delayed orders for replacement parts, resulting in emergency shipments/refills and higher cost

One of the ways to eliminate these operational costs, by 25-30% is to determine remotely if the issue can be addressed
without having to travel onsite. And that requires real-time visibility to the issue at hand. Glassbeam, through its secure
connectivity within the hospital network and intelligent routing, can enable this direct remote access to the scanners,
regardless of where the engineer is.

This helps them remotely troubleshoot issues before the support engineers decide to go onsite. This can cover several
real-world scenarios, such as:

• Operator error
• Diagnose image artifacts
• Database cleanup
• System reboot

There are two types of remote access available on imaging equipment scanners:

• Remote service access (command line/terminal/service screen) – Used to view logs, run backups, execute
  commands
• Remote screen access aka Screen Sharing

Enter Glassbeam Clinsights, exit reactive equipment monitoring

Glassbeam Clinsights has achieved both these methods by leveraging existing features available on the scanner (i.e. no additional software to be installed) and applying state-of-the-art networking that is firewall-friendly and secure. The field engineer can now coordinate with operators to either run remote commands or view real-time logs, or with the technologist’s permission, view and control the actual screen. The added benefit of technologists getting access to the same functionality enables highly productive remote assistance, such as a remote senior expert guiding a junior on a new protocol, or providing emergency assistance when a scan is failing while the patient is on the table.

With great power comes great responsibility

With encrypted web sockets, timed single-use sessions, secure tunneling, and audit trails, coupled with our support for Single Sign On (SSO), Role-Based Access (RBAC) and mobile phone-based 2-factor authentication (2FA), Glassbeam ensures that only authorized personnel will ever have access to this feature.

Don’t take our word for it

We are already starting to see our current customers leverage this to better manage their equipment. We look forward to
seeing them much better equipped to support their mission-critical fleet. Would you like us to run you through a short
demo that mirrors the equipment monitoring issues faced by healthcare providers from a sanitized dataset? Reach out
to me at [email protected] or send a note to
[email protected].

I would recommend this related reading list to deep drive on the topics of remote access and management, controlling
operational costs as well as to get behind the scenes of our Artificial Intelligence technology.

• ROI and Business Impact of Glassbeam Clinsights for Healthcare Providers