Freeing Up Capacity: What We Learned From Our KPIs and Automation Webinar

If you work in HTM, you'll know the feeling: too few hands, too many devices, and a department judged on how fast it puts out fires rather than the value it creates. That was the starting point for last week's EBME Expo webinar, "Creating Capacity Through KPIs and Automation," presented by Phoenix Data Systems. Led by Philip Hodsman, International Sales Director at Phoenix Data Systems, with support from Country Manager Rob Davies, the session drew on the company's 40+ years in healthcare technology management. Its AIMS platform is now used by around 3,000 hospitals in over 20 countries, tracking more than 8 million medical devices, so there's real experience behind the advice.

From cost centre to trusted partner

Philip Hodsman framed the session around a "good to great" curve: the shift from being reactive and seen as a cost centre, to becoming a proactive, data-driven part of the wider hospital alongside finance, safety and logistics. The departments that make that leap, he said, tend to share three things: clean asset data, KPIs that actually mean something, and a genuine culture of continuous improvement.

He was candid about how hard that is in practice. One customer had gone from nine technicians to five in two years, with workload only rising, a story that will sound familiar to a lot of HTM teams. The point he kept coming back to was that automation isn't about squeezing more out of a stretched team. It's about giving that team room to breathe.

The unglamorous problem of messy data

Before KPIs can mean anything, Hodsman argued, the data has to be sorted, and this was the webinar's most eye-opening moment. Across its global customer base, Phoenix Data Systems found over 2,500 different ways a single device type had been recorded, including 19 spellings of "GE" alone.

Cleaning that by hand isn't quick. For a dataset of 20,000 records, Hodsman put the manual effort at around 11 months of full-time work, which makes the case for AI-assisted standardisation almost by itself. In one example, that process took a dataset from around a quarter "clean" to over 80% in a fraction of the time.

The strongest moments came with a stopwatch attached. Uploading a PDF into a CMMS took under four minutes; typing the same data in manually took over 21. Automating documentation for routine PM checks cut the process from around 65 minutes to 29 minutes per device, saving one facility nearly 600 hours across a year.

Questions from the floor

Rob Davies took the final quarter of questions, covering integrations including Real-Time Location Systems in NHS trusts and a planned link with MediShout for end-user fault reporting. He was frank about the barriers too: NHS procurement systems remain notoriously hard to integrate with, though the potential savings once that's cracked are significant.

Everyone who registered has been sent a recording by email, well worth sharing with colleagues who couldn't join live. You can also watch the full recording here. Keep an eye on the EBME Expo news page for details of upcoming webinars.