A CMMS for hospitals carries a complication that most industrial sites do not: part of the register is regulated, inspected and audited by people from outside the organisation. Boilers, generators, medical gas, fire systems and biomedical equipment all have intervals somebody else sets and evidence somebody else will ask to see, while the rest of the estate is ordinary building plant on ordinary intervals. Running both in one system is possible and sensible; running them as though they are the same thing is how an audit goes badly. This page sets out the distinction and what it demands of the software.
Separate the regulated assets in the register, not in a second system
Flag them, do not exile them. A second system for regulated plant guarantees the two drift, and drift is exactly what an auditor finds. What the flag buys you is different behaviour: intervals that cannot be edited casually, evidence retained rather than overwritten, and completion that cannot be back-dated.
Evidence is the difference, and it is a records problem
For ordinary plant, 'done, nothing found' is enough. For regulated plant, the record has to show who did it, against what standard, with what result, retained for a stated period. That is a records requirement, and it is the thing to test in a demo rather than assume.
Biomedical equipment usually belongs to somebody else
Most hospitals run clinical engineering separately from estates, often on a different system, and that is a reasonable split. What is not reasonable is nobody being able to say which register a given device is on, which is a surprisingly common state.
Access and downtime are negotiated, not scheduled
A ward cannot be closed for a PM the way a plant room can. Estates teams in hospitals schedule around clinical activity, and a system that cannot hold 'due, awaiting access' as a distinct state from 'overdue' will misrepresent the function every month.
Questions people ask about cmms for hospitals
Does the CMMS satisfy our regulator?
No system does that; your evidence does. A CMMS makes the evidence retrievable, which is most of the practical battle, but the requirements are your regulator's and your accreditation body's.
Should biomedical assets be in the same system?
It works either way, provided one register is authoritative for each device and everybody knows which. The failure mode is a device in both, maintained in neither.
How do we handle 24-hour access constraints?
Track 'awaiting access' separately from 'overdue'. Merging them makes the maintenance team look like it is failing when it is being prevented, and the distinction is what gets access negotiated.