Courtesy Photo | Radames Feliciano, a biomedical equipment technician with the U.S. Army Medical...... read more read more
By Chief Warrant Officer 3 Richard Hendricks
Director of Home Station Medical Maintenance Support (HMMS), U.S. Army Medical Materiel Agency
FORT LIBERTY, N.C. -- For nearly two decades, I have witnessed the challenges affecting Army units without organic medical equipment specialists.
They have medical devices, yet they have no people trained to perform field-level maintenance.
Often these units had to send their devices to a Medical Maintenance Operations Division, or MMOD, resulting in a decrement to their unit equipment readiness.
In fact, one of the main reasons I became a warrant officer was to fix these types of issues.
That is why I am proud to report that Army Medical Logistics Command is launching a program called Home-Station Medical Maintenance Support, or HMMS, to close these critical maintenance gaps that affect readiness.
HMMS provides field-level maintenance support to units without authorized biomedical equipment specialists (68A) on their Modification Table of Organization and Equipment, more commonly known as MTOE. This will align medical maintenance to existing sustainment processes of non-medical Army equipment. HMMS will also enhance unit medical equipment readiness and reduces overall costs for the Army.
HMMS is one part of a larger effort called MEDLOG in Campaigning, or MiC, which integrates medical logistics into the Army Sustainment Enterprise as part of the Army Campaign Plan 2023-2030. MiC will bring MEDLOG into the Army’s enterprise business systems and standardize the catalog, as well as create a single medical supply and pharmaceutical (e.g., CLVIIIA) catalog, based upon combat requirements.
We just launched the HMMS capability in a proof of concept at Fort Liberty in early October. In total, we received 52 pieces of equipment just on the first day of operations alone.
This initial site will support over 100 units, including active-duty and National Guard, in North Carolina during this initial “proof of concept” phase.
A key part of HMMS will be education. Some customers were unfamiliar with the new processes of opening and transferring work orders, but this is a great opportunity to utilize our representatives of the Logistics Assistance Program, or LAP, under AMLC’s Integrated Logistics Support Center. Logistics assistance representatives, or LARs, provide education and direct support to our customers, providing over-the-shoulder training for these units that do not have organic medical maintenance expertise.
This first HMMS site at Fort Liberty will be a key stepping stone for us, as we assess future sites for expansion of HMMS.
I believe HMMS will solve a critical problem for Army units without organic medical maintenance support. When fully implemented throughout the Army, not only will HMMS save the Army time and money, but also ensure medical devices are ready and fully mission capable when needed to save lives.
| Date Taken: | 10.21.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 10.21.2024 11:54 |
| Story ID: | 483554 |
| Location: | FORT LIBERTY, NORTH CAROLINA, US |
| Web Views: | 87 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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