Biomedical Engineering (BME)

Biomedical Engineering (BME)

Challenge

Bespoke Software for an Asset Management System. Biomedical Engineering (BME) had an old Dataflex Asset Management System dating back to circa 1986. The system had been unsupported for many years and although it had served them well, it was in dire need of replacement.

BME’s work flow and systems were convoluted to match the dated software.

BME had been looking for a new system for over 10 years. Then they came across the opportunity to use eMed, a web-based system developed in-house by Medical Technology & Physics Department (MTP), located at Perth’s Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital.

BME and MTP both have the task to maintain and support equipment for hospitals. The difference is the location of the medical equipment they are in charge of. While MTP engineers are generally in the same hospital as the equipment, BME-maintained equipment is deployed across numerous country hospitals, nursing posts and Flying Doctor bases.

MTP's system ticked all the boxes but for one major issue; MTP had no formal billing, but BME recover all their costs for work by invoicing. It was an essential feature they would need to develop.

However, the MTP engineers working on the system did not have capacity to develop additional functionality.

Solution

Lateral became involved to modify, deploy and support the eMed system for BME, including the invoicing function. As it was tailored towards the needs of MTP, we changed it to BME’s specific requirements.
 

Technology Used

The web-based system is written in LANSA, using their WAMs product. It works on a Windows server, based on a SQL database.

Result

The modified system went live in February 2012. It is very stable - since going live, BME have had no down time at all. eMedhas been managing BME’s core services since then.

The BME version of eMed has been developed to cater for the different locations and as a consequence, searches for equipment, work orders and personnel have been extended to cater for the different hospitals. Lateral have continued to refine eMed to suit business practices and streamline the workflow.

A recent change was made in collaboration with MTP to enable each organisation to view details of work carried out by equipment maintained by both organisations. In addition, a service has been developed that will extract equipment information from both systems into a data warehouse that will be used for combined reporting to the Health Services.

The security module of the BME system has been further developed to allow external access to BME customers. This will enable customers to view information relating to their own equipment where BME have performed maintenance on that equipment.

Richard Dall, Manager at Bio-medical Engineering (BME):

"The Lateral team are very responsive to our needs and have always provided cost effective solutions to our development requirements."

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