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Resources & field guides

Written by our own operations and biomed staff for the practice managers we work with. No email gate, no download form.

Inventory • 6 min read

Par levels without a spreadsheet degree

Count usage, not stock. Pick two typical weeks and record what leaves the shelf, not what sits on it.
Set par at two weeks of usage plus a half-week buffer for anything with a delivery lead time under three days.
Set par at four weeks for allocated or seasonal items — rapid tests, flu vaccine ancillaries, splinting.
Put the number on the shelf, not in a file. A laminated card with item, par, and reorder point beats any portal.
Review quarterly. Provider mix changes faster than most par sheets do.

The most common error we see is par levels set from case quantities rather than usage — a clinic using 40 gloves a week carries a case of 1,000 because that is how it ships.

Sterilization • 8 min read

Why your spore test failed

Load density: pouches must not touch chamber walls or each other. Overloading is the single most common cause we find on site.
Cycle selection: wrapped instruments need the wrapped cycle. Unwrapped cycles will not achieve the same sterilant contact.
Water quality: tap water scales the chamber and shortens gasket life. Use distilled or deionized only.
Gasket age: door gaskets have a replacement interval. Past it, they leak before they look bad.
Incubator temperature: a spore test can fail because the incubator never reached temperature, not because the load did not.

Whatever the cause, quarantine every load processed since the last passing test, retest, and document the corrective action. Regulators care more about the response than the failure.

Operations • 5 min read

A supply audit you can run in one afternoon

Pull twelve months of invoices and sort by spend, highest first. The top 20 lines usually carry 70–80% of the total.
Flag every item with more than two suppliers or more than three SKU variations — that is standardization money.
Check expiry exposure: total value of anything expiring within 120 days.
Count what is in the back that nobody has touched in six months. That is your dead stock number.
Ask two clinical staff which item they most often cannot find. Fix that first — it buys goodwill for everything else.

Bring the results to any distributor, including us. If a rep cannot discuss line-item substitutions against that list, they are selling a catalog rather than a program.

Biomed • 7 min read

Equipment PM: what to schedule and when

Annual: exam tables, procedure lights, centrifuges, spirometers, audiometers, electrosurgery units, dental chairs.
Semi-annual: steam autoclaves in high-volume practices, vacuum and compressor systems, vaccine refrigeration.
Monthly staff checks: AED indicator and pad/battery dates, crash cart expiry sweep, refrigerator min/max log.
On failure only: nothing. If an item has no interval, put it on annual and adjust from findings.
Keep the register in one place: device, serial, location, last service, next due, technician.

The register matters more than the interval. Surveyors ask what equipment you have before they ask when it was serviced.

Continuity • 6 min read

Hurricane season supply planning for Gulf Coast clinics

By June 1: two extra weeks of critical consumables, generator fuel confirmed, cold-chain backup plan in writing.
Photograph your equipment register and store it off-site or in cloud storage before the first named storm.
Pre-arrange a cold-chain destination for vaccine inventory within 30 minutes' drive.
Print your vendor and staff call list. Cellular data is the first thing to go and the last to come back.
After the storm: document any temperature excursion before discarding product — your insurer and manufacturer will both ask.

We pre-stage storm kits for account holders every June and hold delivery slots open in the 48 hours after a landfall forecast.

Equipment • 5 min read

Buying an exam table without regretting it

Measure the doorway, the corridor turn and the room before the model. Power tables are heavy and rarely returnable.
Check the lift capacity against your actual patient population, not the brochure average.
Ask what the stirrup, drawer and outlet configuration costs separately. Base prices rarely include them.
Confirm local service before purchase. An out-of-warranty actuator on an unsupported brand can cost a third of the table.
Budget for uncrating, assembly, old-unit removal and disposal. These are real numbers, not afterthoughts.

We include delivery, assembly, in-service and removal in every equipment quote so the comparison is apples to apples.

Downloads

Printables we hand out on site

Ask your rep or email welcome@sandbox.wiscomed.com and we will send any of these as a PDF, or bring laminated copies on the next delivery. There is no charge and no signup.

Sterilization log book and spore-test failure flowchart
Par-level shelf card template (blank, 24 per sheet)
Monthly AED and crash cart check sheet
Vaccine refrigerator temperature log with excursion instructions
Equipment register template for accreditation binders
Hurricane readiness checklist for outpatient clinics

Ask a technician

Have a piece of equipment behaving oddly? Call 727-944-6902 and ask for biomed. We will talk it through on the phone before anyone quotes you a service call.

Suggest a guide

If you keep running into a problem that is not covered here, tell us. Most of these guides started as a question from a practice manager.

Need a price on a standing order?

Send us last quarter's invoices. We will line-item match what we can, flag what we can beat, and tell you honestly where another distributor is already giving you a better number.

Request a quote Call 727-944-6902