Yesterday’s Annual User-Group Meeting was a great success – thank you to everyone who managed to get there. The attendance was the highest we’ve ever had with users travelling from as far afield as Dublin and Truro, with a sizeable cohort from Scotland. The day was unusual, not only in the large attendance, but also with the exceptional weather and the varied mix of users. The meeting is usually predominantly attended by engineers but yesterday we had a planner/equipper, a nurse trainer and a contract manager.
A lot has happened since last year’s meeting. We have a new office in Stafford where Phil & Sarah are based, and they have been joined on the Help Desk by Jack Foulkes.
We started off with a review of the user-base. We had around a dozen new new customers joining us over the last year and e-Quip is now being used in over 90 hospitals.
Next, Graham went through the developments that were completed last year (in versions 3.5 and 3.6). You can see a full list here: https://www.e-quip.uk.net/blog/version-3-6-0-will-be-released-this-week/
Phil then did a presentation of the 2 new web applications: a completely revamped version of the ward users app and a nurse training & competence app that nurses and their trainers can use to update their training records. You can see a demo of the ward users app here. That will give you an idea what it can do but Phil’s presentation highlighted its flexibility, both in terms of how it can be configured for individual users and also in how it responds to being run on different platforms. It looks great whether you run it on a phone, tablet or desktop. One of these days I’ll see if I can get Phil to put up a blog article about it.
The nurse training & competence app allows virtually the same functionality as the desktop system, even down to being able to produce cross-tab TNA reports. Phil or Sarah will give everyone a link to a demo version as soon as they have published it, probably in the next couple of days. There were some useful suggestions from the floor about how training managers can be more easily identified for nurses based on work location, so we will be adding those into the system shortly.
The next presentation introduced the new interactive dashboard. First, the design goals were introduced. The dashboard is intended to be:
- A reporting tool
- A navigation facility
- A KPI generator
Starting with PPM compliance we demonstrated each of these features:
First, the dashboard is a reporting tool. It shows similar data to other reports within e-Quip it just shows it in a more graphical way.
Second, the dashboard is a navigation tool. We can see above that there are 278 PPM compliant high-risk devices. Double-clicking on the gauge opens the equipment screen and shows those 278 assets. Similarly, when you move the mouse over the high-risk PPM non-compliance pie chart you can see that there are 43 high-risk devices which are more than 60 days overdue for PPM. Double-clicking on the red wedge in the pie chart opens the equipment screen and displays them. This applies to virtually every gauge, graph or chart in the dashboard.
Finally, the dashboard is a KPI generator. Whether 68% compliance for high-risk equipment (i.e. 278 out of 408) is good, bad or otherwise is determined by local policies. If you look at the gauge you will see that it has 3 sections:
Red: 0 – 33%
Yellow: 33 – 67%
Green: > 67%
Both the values and the colours can be set for each gauge (as you may well have different KPI’s for medium- and low-risk devices). This is done on one of the Settings screens.
Changing these setting won’t change the position of the gauge needle, but it will change the appearance of the gauge.
Having shown the basic idea we then went on to show all of the dashboard screens that we have created so far. Naturally these reports can all be saved as PDF documents. Click here for a copy.
There are too many to show all of them here (the PDF shows all of them) but here are a few samples to give you the general idea. Each one is configurable and can be used for navigation.
The new dashboard was extremely well-received by the users.
Next we went on to demonstrate the new procurement functionality of e-Quip which has been moved from the old e-Quip PM (Procurement Management) system. Having shown the basic ideas, Colette from Dublin then gave a presentation to show how she is using this new functionality in the new-build project at the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dun Laoghaire. We got some good pointers from Colette and will be adding her suggestions to e-Quip as soon as we can. By the way, Colette was the first ever e-Quip customer, back in 2009. This was when the only screens that e-Quip had were equipment, brand, model, category, location, site and service and provider. We’ve certainly come a long way, with your help, since then!
So, that’s it for another year. We ran out of time and didn’t get a chance to show all the other things that we have planned for this year. If next year’s meeting is as successful as this year’s, we’ll have to look for an alternative location.