Bonner General Health Finds New Tracking, Reporting & Results with TheWorxHub™
Bonner General Health has been around since 1949 and serves a small community of 8,000 with critical and ongoing care, providing services ranging from surgical to behavioral health and everything in between.
Although Curtis Johnson has only been on staff for a year, he quickly moved from HVAC Specialist to Maintenance Lead, filling their need for someone to head their maintenance staff. They have five full-time maintenance staff (two specialists and three generalists) and three custodians on their team. Most of their daily work consists of maintaining utilities, fixing drywall, painting and fixing assets at their critical access hospital, physical therapy rehabilitation center, immediate care center and office building.
One issue that the team was working through when Curtis joined was moving off of a paper-based work order system that was difficult to track and manage.
“I was shown paper work order documents going back to 1998 that we still had in boxes and filings,” Curtis says.
That created a lot of accountability issues, he says: “The hospital staff would say they wrote [the work request] and no one ever came to work on it. We didn’t know if the work request was actually submitted.”
New system
With TheWorxHub operations management software from Brightly, they found a cloud-based system that was subscription based and fit their needs.
“Having the software and being able to scroll through a list helps you prioritize what you will be doing in a day,” he says.
Curtis began implementing TheWorxHub about a year ago, adding room numbers and locations for assets, so he could create maps and locations throughout the hospital for more exact work. They’re now tracking their reactive maintenance, and they’ve put 2,100 work orders through the system in the last seven months.
“We took advantage of all of the virtual trainings and help videos,” he says of the implementation support from Brightly. “A lot of it is intuitive, but there were times when we want to make sure we’re being the most efficient when we’re doing it.”
New results
Curtis says that their new-found tracking capabilities are the best part of the software.
“It’s making sure that all of our people are doing what they’re supposed to and adding that accountability. That goes all the way up to purchasing and capital expenditures and all the way down to our end user working on the work order that they say they are,” he says.
They’ve also used TheWorxHub to track compliance work and projects, such as inspecting fire doors and creating work orders for the non-compliant ones.
“We’re now tracking what work orders are being done, making sure there is follow-through and that the quality is there."
We can track if a certain piece of equipment is causing failures and extra work and use that as justification in a capital request.
“It doesn’t just help our department, it helps the hospital know how to spend money more efficiently,” Curtis says.
New reporting
Since it’s easy to pull reports now, Curtis can see them using reporting even more in the days to come.
“I know that now we have record-keeping and we can better track that in the future,” he says. “I can say that we will see improvement year after year in efficiency moving forward.”
He also said their CFO is starting to ask for reporting on spending, productivity, etc., and he’ll be able to provide that with TheWorxHub. An additional benefit is the ability to show work requesters in other departments what’s being done and why.
“When you put it on paper and have that data, they can understand it better,” he says.
Their maintenance team has also taken advantage of the mobile app with TheWorxHub on their tablets to gather data and complete work faster.
“Now, we’re capturing the data, and it will help us in the long term if we need to make a justification for another person or outsourcing,” he explains.
Curtis says he would tell other hospitals that the cost of TheWorxHub has a great ROI with the potential to create savings by tracking and leveraging data to see when money should be spent on equipment or staff to be most efficient.
“[TheWorxHub] will pay for itself in the operational efficiency of your department.”
