How Accruent is Optimizing Ventilator Uptime for COVID-19

By Michael Garel, Director of Data Strategy

With the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic across the United States, you are no doubt aware of the nation’s ventilator shortage.

The Accruent Data Insights team has created a free tool for healthcare organizations to address one of the biggest challenges at hand, keeping ventilators running when it matters most.

In researching the ventilator challenge, we discovered that:

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) worst-case scenario projects between 160 and 214 million confirmed COVID-19 cases in the US by the time this pandemic is over.
• The American Hospital Association (AHA) held a webinar where they were a bit more optimistic, at 96 million COVID-19 cases requiring 4.8 million patients hospitalized.
• The Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM) projects that 2.5% of COVID-19 patients will require mechanical ventilation.
• The AHA found that hospitals have approximately 62,000 mechanical ventilators with an additional 100,000 retired devices that could be brought back to service.
• The US Strategic National Stockpile has 13,000 ventilators available.

With some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and assuming the AHA’s more optimistic number of COVID-19 cases, approximately 2.4 million patients will require mechanical ventilation with a total of 175,000 available ventilators. Given that ventilator utilization may be three times or more what you would typically see, “waiting for a part” is not a good excuse for a ventilator being down for maintenance.

After iterations and meetings with customers, we created a free COVID-19 Part Predictor For Ventilators. The purpose of this tool is to inform hospitals what replacement parts they should have on-hand or in a warehouse to ensure the least amount of downtime of their ventilator inventory. The tool was built using aggregated data from our Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS), which is in over 55% of the hospitals across the United States. Best of all, it is free to use, absolutely no strings attached. It is our way of trying to help hospitals cope with the pandemic.

The Accruent Data Insights COVID-19 Part Predictor for Ventilators is a valuable resource for Clinical Engineers, Parts Specialists, Supply Chain Managers, and other healthcare leaders to help them stay ahead of the wave. Go to cv19data.accruent.com and enter in your inventory by model, age, and quantity. A report providing a list of parts and quantities will be dynamically generated. The hospital can then check the list against its parts inventory to determine what parts they should order. We also provide the ability to download a CSV file of the report to share with others within your organization. One thing to note, the insights provided in this report reflect normal ventilator usage. We are hearing that ventilator usage could be three times or greater, so hospitals should take the potential for increased part requirements due to increased usage into account when planning their replacement part needs.

Watch the Webinar: COVID-19: Strategies to Optimize Healthcare Support Services.

In addition to providing replacement part prediction to hospitals, we are also working with parts suppliers to ensure that the supply chain downstream has an adequate amount of parts necessary to support the demand.

As we work together through these tough times, know that Accruent is here to help. Please reach out to us for help managing your asset needs.

For more information, please email adi@accruent.com. We will try to respond within 24 hours.