Revolutionizing clinical asset management

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TRIMEDX boosts the health and safety of healthcare delivery systems with a technology-based approach to medical device management and security

As a general business principle, we tend to think of clinical asset management in terms of cost savings. In healthcare, future-forward clinical asset management systems are also helping save lives. Healthcare technology management company TRIMEDX lives on that vital cusp with game-changing, comprehensive clinical asset management (CAM) solutions created by providers, for providers, designed to drive operational expenses down while maximizing resources and their availability for patient care as well as improving and delivering connected device safety and protection.

From serving providers with 20-plus beds to over 20,000, TRIMEDX provides these comprehensive services for more than two million pieces of equipment.

“TRIMEDX originated from working alongside clinicians as part of Ascension Healthcare and evolved into a private company that’s now at over 3,700 locations across the US,” Scott Trevino, the company’s SVP of Product Management and Solutions, told BOSS.

From deploying best-in-class on-site clinical engineering teams that maintain and perform preventative maintenance and service, to providing comprehensive medical device cybersecurity, TRIMEDX uses leading-edge, OEM-agnostic technology, machine learning and data analytics to provide critical insights that allow healthcare delivery systems to unlock the full potential of its clinical assets.

The Indianapolis-based firm services a broad array of medical devices, from MR scanners to lab equipment, spearheaded by an agile, engaged and highly-trained workforce.

“Our interest is our clients’ interest in the optimization of their goals, objectives and needs. We have fantastic relationships with a large number of OEMs and work very closely with them,” Trevino said.

Staffers are commonly woven into the fabric of the facilities they serve.

“Our associates have badges and go into the hospitals just like hospital employees; they’re on site every day to help ensure critical medical devices are safe and available for use, so they're essential workers,” Trevino said. “The coverage we provide is actually an aid in many cases to the OEMs who often have much more limited geographics and time to service customers, especially when servicing remote clients may be problematic. Certainly, we’re competitors in some senses, and in other senses, we do have great collaborative relationships.”

The company’s proprietary computerized maintenance management system, RSQ, drives the service component, integrating their technology into a system’s own tech ecosystem. The strategy enables them to leverage their work order system, which handles roughly 700,000 work orders annually. They have also developed a proactive, real-time predictive maintenance technology that helps to reduce unplanned equipment downtime.

Understanding the full scope of clinical asset management

“We help our clients understand their current equipment’s relative performance as well as performance against known standards, which then allows them to define what their goals may be, what good looks like for them, or what the aspirational next step is to get to desired benchmarking and device utilization,” Trevino said.

CAM also allows them to optimize their device fleet, identifying redundancy and a host of other factors, and uses a proprietary scoring system that identifies if and when devices should be replaced, upgraded, dispositioned or reallocated.

“We take into account parts availability, repair events, years of remaining useful life, how many FDA recalls, downtime, cybersecurity risk and utilization. All of those things go into our proprietary scoring algorithm (RUDRSM) to make those recommendations,” Trevino said. “We see huge benefits and potential to help our clients achieve their goals in doing that, and we’re very proud of our unique approach.”

TRIMEDX’s distinctive approaches have resulted in 99% device uptime and can help hospitals and healthcare systems avoid 15 to 25% of unnecessary capital investments.

“It might sound basic, but technology-enabled informatics starts with accurate identification of your full fleet —your inventory of devices,” Trevino said. “We often find that clients don’t always have a full inventory or an understanding potentially, especially of connected devices.”

A number of factors are assessed to help clients get a better handle on where utilization is high, and where it may be low.

“We find that utilization of medical equipment in the clinical setting is very low, so while many in the industry continue to buy more equipment, there can be a double impact because they’re spending more on new assets while underutilizing current ones,” Trevino said.

When the company analyzed data from more than 3.4 million assets across over 3,000 client sites, they found that clinical asset utilization normally is around 40-50%.

“As we all know, cost is a significant issue in health care, especially in the recent past. We help with that. We also look at not only replacing equipment there, but we also make recommendations about reallocating equipment or upgrading equipment instead of replacing,” Trevino said. “Finally, there’s dispositioning of equipment that’s end-of-life, excess or no longer efficient or if the cost of maintaining it outweighs any utilization of that device. We also help our clients sell equipment that is no longer needed by them, but still has years of useful life, as part of our complete CAM lifecycle management solution.”

While informatics is key to providing actionable insights and recommendations to optimally manage assets to meet business goals, it also has a critical role in cybersecurity. Associates are trained in the company’s CYBER Academy to become the most competent, capable, medical device cybersecurity team in the industry.

The TRIMEDX solution blends CAM and informatics to create comprehensive risk profiles across a healthcare system’s connected devices, not just medical ones. Device activities are automatically monitored and evaluated for vulnerabilities and the potential for compromise. Risks are scored on both the typical profile of the device and its behavior, which is standard in any cyber approach, and also uniquely incorporates patient safety.

“We’ve invested in an exclusive partnership with Medigate, which is a unique and valuable technology partner that allows us to passively discover all connected medical devices in a client’s networks,” Trevino said. “We did a complete assessment of medical device security platform (MDSP) providers, and it became a clear choice for us to partner with the only one that's dedicated to medical devices specifically and has great expertise there. They also have some technological capabilities that, based on our experience, has reduced the number of false positives or risks that don’t exist. It was a great complement to our offerings.”

Utilization data and passive network detection capabilities help with CAM and the core clinical engineering team’s efforts in identifying device location and activity.

“If they’re vulnerable, we can quickly sequester them and/or dispatch a patch across the network,” Trevino said.

The solution is tied into the TRIMEDX Quality Management System and its compliance team, which monitors the newswire in order to ensure safety by quickly responding to FDA recalls and alerts. Additionally, there is a cybersecurity team that continually monitors for new cyber threats and vulnerabilities as well as working with OEMs on mitigations and patching.

“Compliance is first and foremost,” Trevino said. “We have a centralized Quality and Regulatory Compliance team of experts at TRIMEDX, and we adhere to all state and federal regulations with our clients and programs.”

The company is on track to release its enhanced Clinical Asset Informatics solution that will proactively provide insights, recommended actions and will have the ability to drive projects around optimizing clinical assets. This will further enhance the ability for clients to drive, monitor, report and manage the insights and recommendations gleaned from collected data.