How many times have you completed an inventory assessment? Some of our clients have done dozens, and they just don’t stick — but why? The short answer is: ongoing disposition process compliance. Or rather, a lack of compliance.
A lot of medical systems use outdated, often paper-driven purchasing and disposition workflows. Or they use under-equipped software, like Excel or Word, paired with hard-to-track emails.
When assessing your disposition process, be sure to ask a couple questions: How many steps does it take to complete the removal of retired equipment? How many signatures and approvals are required for that disposition?
If you’re passing a paper document, there’s a lot of room for error, including that form slipping through the cracks or getting lost.
If you’re a step ahead and using digital documents, at least the handoff is simpler. But how do you manage version control? How many variations of that document exist after being saved and resaved with changes? How often does it stall in someone’s inbox along the way?
And once clinical engineering approvals are made, how consistently does that document get back to accounting to update their asset ledger?
What if there’s a better way?
A single home base that integrates your entire team drastically reduces disposition process compliance failure. And a simplified tool that isn’t a headache to manage increases team-wide compliance.
Tie that directly to your actual equipment data? You may have just found a golden goose.
BidMed’s Workflow+ is an optimized, cloud-based inventory management tool. With user-based account permissions, every department can access the same easy-to-navigate database.
Start with a Clean Equipment List
Whether you choose to clean your records in-house, have recently processed inventory, or hire our team to get you back on track, it’s essential to start with a clean and accurate asset ledger. BidMed offers a number of services to get you back on track:
Data Cleaning
Even if you’re confident that all assets are recorded, you may still struggle to find and update them due to data inconsistencies. These may include spelling errors or variations in nomenclature.
BidMed’s data specialists can comb your list and reconcile these inconsistencies. This helps ensure nothing falls through the cracks moving forward.
Inventory Processing
Our teams can also process inventory on-site with unparalleled speed and accuracy using the Helix Mobile app. Their experience, professionalism, and attention to detail ensure accuracy and completeness, even in active hospital settings.
Assessment & Reconciliation
If you want or need a record comparing a previous inventory record to our team’s processed list, our reconciliation reports provide transparency and clarity. These reports show:
Verified Assets | Assets on original inventory list and found on-site.
Unverified Assets | Assets on original inventory list, but not found on-site.
New Adds | Assets found on-site, but not on original inventory list (or with discrepancies preventing a match).
Implement New Disposition Processes with Intuitive Software that Connects All Stakeholders
Consistency and compliance depends directly on the tools used by your team. BidMed’s Helix tech suite combines a mobile app for inventory processing, cloud-based inventory software to track and manage inventory, and easy disposition tools.
Keep inventory updated in real-time with the Helix Mobile companion app.
Request dispositions from your inventory list, minimizing errors or omissions of important data.
Automatically notify the next responsible party as soon as actions are completed.
Centralize approvals between biomed department heads, finance, and accounting.
Track the approval process in real time with a shared dashboard. Always know who’s responsible next in the team workflow.
Easily update central records when assets officially leave your dock.
Improve Disposition Process Compliance and Accountability with Annual Reports and Audits
Once you have a clean start and a system to stay on top of changes, it’s still important to check periodically that everything is on track.
BidMed’s Helix software includes a number of reporting tools for dispositions, as well as overall financial savings and recovery.
Disposition Reports | Export all dispositions completed (or denied) between customizable dates. These reports can be shared with Accounting Operations or other oversight departments, or simply kept as a hard copy record.
Reporting Dashboard | Review all financial information in your account, including:
- completed FMV reports
- value retained in-network on the Private Exchange
- value returned over trade-in value
- overall value returned through dispositions on the Exchange
- value of donations made
- distribution of disposition methods (transfer, trade-in, re-sale, donations, scrap)
Annual Audits | In addition to these reports available directly in Workflow+, BidMed also specializes in quarterly or annual audits of existing inventory. These ensure records stay clean and help validate compliance with new disposition processes.
Comparing existing records to on-site equipment significantly expedites inventory processing. Our teams can often complete this process 70% faster than from-scratch inventory projects.