Army’s medical logisticians using technology to boost readiness – Federal News Network

Improvements in technology are letting the Army’s Medical Logistics Command cut its repair times from days to hours.
In the not-very-distant past, when a piece of medical equipment the Army relies on to care for soldiers in austere environments failed, it meant a time challenge for the service’s medical logistics community: The equipment often needed to be transported to the Army’s highly experienced maintainers, taking it out of service for days at a time.
But the logistics community has started to embrace telemaintenance — something akin to telemedicine, except for medical equipment. That’s meant the most experienced medical logisticians can now lend their expertise from a distance, in ways that end up getting equipment fixed in hours instead of days.
“Any time a medical device or any equipment leaves a theater, it’s a loss of the capability,” Wes Ladlee, the chief of Army Medical Logistics Command’s maintenance support office, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “And the time it takes to ship parts to get to a theater so they can be installed and get the capability up and running is lost downtime to readiness, it’s a risk to patients. It’s all about getting the maintenance right there at the point of need. To be able to have this type of system is almost putting you there with the soldier. Being able to mentor them and train them and help them, and obviously fix the equipment as soon as possible, has really been a game changer so far.”
The first wave of medical logistics improvements began in 2017, when AMLC started assembling expert “fly away” teams to help repair equipment at units that didn’t have their own biomedical equipment specialists, designated 68As in the Army.
More recently though, the command has started leveraging technology both to better support those teams and to solve some problems remotely.
Under the traditional flyaway team model, a team could arrive within 72 hours of a request — but travel time, the repair itself and the return trip meant total downtime could stretch to six or seven days. For a medical facility with a single CT scanner, that represents a significant gap in diagnostic capability.
“So if we can improve that readiness time from seven days down to eight hours, I think that’s significant,” Ladlee said. “We’ve been using it to diagnose the problem. So for repairs that we do need to send someone on site, we can have a telemaintenance call before they even go out so we know exactly what parts we need to bring on hand, exactly where it’s going to go, and then develop the plan of action before we even get there. Lots of times reading the equipment history, you may know that if I replace this part, I’m probably also going to have to replace this part. And some of that stuff can be viewed and through the equipment history or just viewed on the video calls and talking with soldiers. So it’s really been a real lifesaver in the preparation for going on these site missions as well.”
Two significant technology improvements have helped with the diagnostics and repair process. For one, AMLC’s teams are now using remote video technology — and soon, augmented reality — to examine equipment from “over the horizon.”
“We do utilize Microsoft Teams and whatever they have available in theater, but sometimes you need to get a camera deep into a circuit to actually see what’s happening inside there, see some of the wiring, stuff like that,” Ladlee said. “So it’s not probably areas where your regular laptop can get, because medical equipment sometimes can be very small. So it’s utilizing some of that type of technology.”
Meanwhile, an update that consolidated the Army’s logistics IT systems into Global Combat Support System-Army also now gives 68As detailed maintenance histories for any particular piece of distant equipment they’ve been asked to help diagnose or repair.
“There’s been many different maintenance databases that have been used throughout the Army, and we’re finally, for the most part, all inside GCSS Army,” Ladlee said. “And then those transactions can happen back and forth, so much easier. Having that equipment history, knowing exactly what’s been going on with that serial number and some of the actions that were performed prior certainly help with the troubleshooting and just the background, because it’s almost like every device has their own history or personality, and you’ll find through the years that certain things happen repeatedly on the same devices. So lots of times it’s something that you can go and say, ‘Hey, three years ago this technician worked on this device. This was the error code.’ And then you can go right back to that and start eliminating things right away.”
Going forward, Ladlee said, AMLC also plans to start incorporating augmented reality technology into their remote logistics toolkit.
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“Augmented reality and smart glasses can help take you to the system, take you to the manual that can be uploaded and then help the technicians walk through it. You can point to something on your screen and then it highlights a circuit inside the soldier’s smart glasses that they’re wearing. So there’s major advancements in technology that we plan on implementing, hopefully in the very near future,” he said.
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Jared Serbu is deputy editor of Federal News Network and reports on the Defense Department’s contracting, legislative, workforce and IT issues.
Follow @jserbuWFED

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