As a veterinary practice owner, your number one priority is caring for your patients. However, they’re not the only ones who need preventive care. The equipment you depend on to provide that care needs maintenance too. Not only does broken equipment have consequences for your finances, but it also impacts your reputation, your efficiency, and your patients and pet parents.

3 reasons equipment maintenance gets overlooked

If you have a car, you know taking care of it is important. “If you don’t change the oil, you know it’s going to break down eventually,” says Rick Warter, Director of Sales, Capital Equipment, and Solutions at MWI Animal Health. But even when you know the importance of equipment care and maintenance, Warter says there are several reasons they may fall by the wayside.

1. The need to focus on patient care

Practices are often so busy taking care of patients that they forget to take proper care of their equipment. “People got into veterinary medicine because they love animals and want to help them, so that is where they want to spend their time. There’s always some patient care incident happening that takes us away from those maintenance tasks, and we don’t prioritize taking care of the equipment, we prioritize taking care of the pets,” Warter says.

2. No system for accountability

Many practices don’t have any process in place to make sure they maintain their equipment. For example, you know that if you don't clean your autoclave regularly, it’s more likely to break. However, making sure that happens consistently can pose a challenge.

“You get an autoclave and it’s shiny and new, and for the next six months, you clean it once a month,” says Warter. “But then you get busy with patient care and you skip the day you normally do it.” Before you know it, there are huge gaps in between each cleaning, and months have gone by before anyone has cleaned the autoclave properly.

3. Misunderstanding equipment life

Neglecting maintenance may also result from a misconception about how long equipment lasts. “A digital X-ray is not something you buy one time and then have for the entire life of your practice,” Warter explains. “You have to keep it up to date, and then you have to replace it when it breaks.”

Just as waiting until common household appliances break to replace them is less than ideal, you need to think about your veterinary equipment’s life expectancy and stay ahead of outages. “Ideally, you’d like to replace your refrigerator just before it breaks so that you don’t have to throw away all your food when it stops working. It’s the same with veterinary medicine,” says Warter.

Three effects of broken equipment

“I think the biggest misconception is that equipment breakdown is not that impactful,” Warter says. The reality is when your practice technology malfunctions or breaks, it affects your clients, your staff, and your bottom line.

1. Financial impacts

Let’s say your dental machine breaks down. Getting a service technician in to repair it can take up to two weeks and cost $250. That doesn't represent your total cost, however. “How many patients did you have to defer? How many clients might you potentially lose during that two weeks? How much time did your staff have to spend calling those clients and telling them not to bring their pets in?” Warter asks.

Additionally, you have to find other work for the technicians you scheduled to do the procedures. “These may not be revenue-generating activities, so you’re going to miss out on that revenue generation for two weeks,” Warter says. “And even if nine of the 10 clients end up rescheduling in the following two weeks, now you have double the amount of dentals to do.” This could result in having to pay staff overtime to catch up.

2. Client impacts

Broken-down equipment can damage your practice's reputation. Clients are often anxious about their pets going under anesthesia, so when you call and tell them your machine has broken down and you need to reschedule, they may lose confidence in you. “If you’re letting an important piece of equipment like an anesthesia machine break, it makes the pet parents question everything about your practice,” Warter says. “They don’t want to go somewhere with faulty or old equipment.”

Equipment that doesn't work correctly also creates risks for the pets in your care. Warter says he has seen improperly functioning dental equipment deliver an electric shock to a pet. Vaporizers should undergo calibration once a year, and if they aren’t, “There’s no way to know if it’s actually delivering 2% when it’s set at 2%,” says Warter. This can result in a patient waking up in the middle of a procedure or, in worst-case scenarios, loss of organ function, coma, or death.

3. Staff impacts

Repeated equipment failures are also bad for your staff’s confidence. As a registered veterinary technician (RVT) who formerly spent over 20 years working in practice, Warter acknowledges that malfunctioning equipment is extremely defeating. “Your staff wants to provide good patient care, and if they don’t have the tools to do that, they get frustrated and might want to work somewhere else,” he says. Working overtime to make up for downtime due to outages can also impact staff morale.

The value of preventive maintenance

There are two solutions to all of these problems, Warter says. One is to have multiples of each piece of equipment, which is extremely costly. Alternatively, you could invest in a reliable program to maintain your equipment well so it doesn’t break down and you can replace it before it fails.

MWI's equipment health solution is a customizable, all-in-one solution for preventive care and management of your veterinary equipment. Here’s a look at the benefits it provides.

Handles all maintenance levels

Warter says there are three levels of maintenance required for equipment, including:

Level I: Routine maintenance (done by staff)
Level II: Preventive maintenance (done by trained technician)
Level III: Break/fix

MWI's equipment health solution is the only solution designed to address each of these levels in a highly efficient and intelligent manner. Other companies typically send a technician to your clinic once a month to perform Level I and II services on your equipment. One problem with this is that not all your equipment needs monthly servicing — while some needs servicing more often than once a month. Your staff may rely on a once-a-month maintenance visit for equipment that needs it more often.

But an even bigger problem is that your monthly service visit may not coincide with a Level III break/fix need, potentially leaving you without a necessary piece of equipment for several weeks. With MWI's equipment health solution, you have a network of virtual and on-site repair technicians who can quickly diagnose the problem via access to your equipment history. In fact, in a six-month piloted group study, technicians solved 64 percent of tickets virtually — no on-site visit required — within hours.¹

Asset management and analytics

MWI's equipment health solution includes digital tracking software, a solution no other company offers. When you sign up, every piece of your equipment gets a QR code tag, entering it into the software and giving you easy access to data such as recommended maintenance schedules, purchase dates, manufacturer information, warranty status, and accessories for each item so you can order them as needed. The software tracks both in-house and external maintenance recommendations for each item, alerting your staff when maintenance tasks are necessary and logging their completion.

Data analytics lets you view your equipment’s performance, indications that it needs service, and when you need to replace it. This also allows you to pinpoint which equipment and services are the most helpful in your practice.

Return on investment (ROI)

According to Warter, an equipment health solution saves your practice money in three areas: true cost savings, decreased breakdowns, and intangible costs, such as lost revenue from downtime, patients who don’t rebook, and staff time spent on tasks that don’t generate revenue.

The six-month pilot study of six veterinary clinics reported 35 equipment problems. After their investment in equipment health solutions, their overall estimated savings for these issues was $4,013 per location, per year. 1 Much of this savings was due to the virtual tech’s ability to solve many of the problems.

Beyond the dollar savings, MWI's equipment health solution delivers additional benefits, such as maintaining good staff morale, boosting client perception, ease of ordering accessories, increasing staff productivity, and aiding financial planning through analytics.

Warter points out that in human medicine, equipment maintenance is so crucial to patients’ well-being, that it’s subject to regulation. He believes the veterinary medicine field needs to shift its thinking in the same direction and prioritize equipment maintenance more because the impact on patient care is so significant.

“Equipment is so truly tied to the well-being of the pet. We all do this because we love animals and we want to take care of them, but if our equipment doesn’t work, we can’t do that primary function,” Warter says. “If we take better care of our equipment and understand it’s on a lifecycle and we replace it when it needs to be replaced instead of keeping it in service for 40 years, our patient care will improve, which is what matters.”