CME Insider's Blog Posts

Medical spaces are notoriously known for being uncomfortable, restrictive, and coldly clinical. The equipment in healthcare facilities is often designed with the intent to treat patients as opposed to being aesthetically pleasing.

Champion has shifted toward patient-centered design, which emphasizes human needs and comfortable convenience. Furniture crafted with these principles in mind is more intuitive and accessible. Here’s why that’s critical to better patient outcomes and experiences, especially in an era of emerging diseases and nuanced medical needs.

Work Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WRMSDs) are painful injuries affecting the muscles, nerves, ligaments, and tendons of up to 90% of sonographers and other users of diagnostic medical sonography. WRMSDs develop gradually over a period of time from repeated exposure to risk factors and are among the most frequently reported cause of restricted or lost work time. WRMSDs can impose a substantial personal toll on those affected since they may no longer be able to work or perform simple personal tasks and activities of daily living. 20% of sonographers who were symptomatic suffered career-ending injuries.

Utility carts are used in every department in hospitals, surgery centers, and clinics for organizing, storing, and moving essentials around. Unfortunately, there has been extraordinarily little innovation in manufacturing these important and much-used items until recently. Blickman Industries has just released a new and improved utility cart line. Here are three reasons why they are an excellent choice for future purchases!

Since the latest COVID surge has died down, many hospitals and surgery centers are now tackling the mountain of backlogged surgeries. Healthcare facilities need to streamline surgical processes to maximize throughput. Choosing the right surgical cart is critical. Metro’s team is consistently looking for ways to make supply transport and storage easier and more efficient for healthcare professionals. While researching storage and transport requirements for sterile processing operations, our team noticed that case carts lacked key features that could improve workflow.

Facilities were improvising to make their processes work, like using soccer cones to identify cart status, needing mittens to pull carts out of the cart washer, and fighting with carts to keep them tracking in a straight line and going around corners. The lack of a designed solution caused unnecessary inefficiencies throughout the day-to-day activities.

Introducing Metro CaseVue™, the all-new case cart that is designed around the day-to-day operations of facilities with enhancements that remove the improv and allow the sterile processing department to work more efficiently.

We get it. Selecting new ECG technology probably isn’t the most exciting thing you’ll do today. But with heart disease on the rise, it may be the most important. For too many practices, ECGs are viewed as commodities—they just need to be “good enough.”

Buying new equipment, fully warranted from the manufacturer, has always been the preferred course for most healthcare facilities’ purchasing departments. Increased lead times, raw material shortages, and rising prices have prompted supply chains to look at more readily available and less expensive refurbished or used equipment. There are many things to consider when looking to purchase refurbished or used equipment. The first thing to know is the difference between refurbished and used. Refurbished equipment is previously owned equipment restored to the original manufacturer’s standards. Used equipment implies that the equipment comes “as is”. Refurbished is usually preferred over used equipment. Here are three other issues to clarify prior to purchasing.

With healthcare equipment prices rising and lead times remaining long, there does not seem to be much light at the end of the tunnel. There are some glimmers of hope that things are improving, and that relief is on the way! The three key issues contributing to the supply chain issues are raw materials/component shortages, transportation/freight breakdowns, and labor shortages. All three have contributed to the price spikes and volatility in the industry.

Pushing, pulling, and transporting patient beds and stretchers is fairly common in most hospitals. Transporting beds from one area of the hospital to another can also be problematic. Many beds that are moved are “specialty” by nature, including Air Fluidized Therapy (AFT) and Bariatric beds, which are extremely heavy (up to 1500 lbs.) and sometimes have patients on them! Transportation routes can include slopes, ramps, carpets, and other obstacles that magnify the problem. Moving these beds and stretchers can cause strain; straining incidents are the NUMBER ONE cause of injury to healthcare workers. Workers’ compensation costs can be upwards of $5,000 per case, not to mention the loss of the healthcare worker for potentially extended periods. Hospitals are experiencing labor shortages, so minimizing workplace injuries is a BIG focus.

Crash carts or code carts are one of the most important tools used at medical facilities. If one of these code blue carts is called into action, someone's life is on the line. This is why each emergency crash cart should be optimized to be as efficient as possible. Here are some common issues medical staffers have faced with these medical carts and the innovations Metro has created to combat them.