The Durable Medical Equipment (DME) Sales and Rental business shares many similarities with other equipment businesses, yet has stark differences as well. While inventory management and record maintenance can be headaches for any business, a DME business also has to worry about confidentiality and privacy due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The nuances of a DME business prevent the use of any run-of-the-mill asset tracking solution, but have hope! There are solutions out there to meet the unique demands of medical equipment asset tracking.
Here are 10 tips when selecting a Durable Medical Equipment Asset Tracking solution:
- Be concerned with HIPAA! Your solution must take HIPAA compliance seriously. Don’t forget to think through all aspects of where the data will be moving, including a Cloud solution.
Panasonic’s Toughpad is a popular option for medical equipment asset tracking. - Look for built-in proof of delivery features. The best is signature capture capability.
- Make your life (and your customers’ lives) easier and clutter-free by selecting a solution that enables emailed receipts/invoices when your customer wants them.
- Does it easily integrate with your financial accounting software, such as QuickBooks? There’s no point in having an electronic system if you’ll have to manually re-enter the information into another system later.
- Capture and process as much data as possible electronically. If there will still be a large paper component (filing, sorting, and storing documents), then find another solution.
- Make inventory management simple and efficient! This prevents lost items, underutilized assets, low return on investment, and extensive time spent on manual inventories.
- Alleviate miscommunication when dispatching deliveries and pickups to field representatives. Your solution should easily and quickly allow you to send new requests to field reps electronically.
Honeywell’s Dolphin 70e Black is another easy-to-use rugged mobile device for medical equipment asset tracking - Is that a 1 or a 7? If you’re manually copying model and serial numbers, there’s a high probability of transcription and legibility errors. Ensure that your chosen solution makes use of barcode or RFID technology.
- When communication with your field reps is critical, consider a solution that enables you to utilize voice communications. Make sure your mobile devices (e.g. Dolphin™ 70e Black or Panasonic Toughpad) are capable of phone calls and emails.
- Finally, have the employees who will be using the system check it out. If it ends up taking your employees more time to use than your current process, I’d recommend you keep looking! But, don’t forget though that any solution will have a learning curve that will go away with time.
So there you have it. While not all-inclusive, these 10 tips should get you pointed in the right direction when selecting a Medical Equipment Asset Tracking solution. If you’d like to work through any other aspects of an ideal solution, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’re here to help you achieve success!
