While the main goal of all healthcare organizations is to provide excellent patient care, they are also under pressure to contain costs. One area that needs to be addressed is asset management. In the past,  the technology available to manage mobile assets was expensive and proprietary. One of the biggest aspects of asset management facing healthcare organizations is ‘asset invisibility’. Not knowing where valuable equipment and critical staff are when needed results in wasted time for both staff and patients. It also results in poor asset utilization which leads to unnecessary purchases and extended leases. Asset invisibility leads to:

Hospitals over-procure 20-30% of their mobile assets Nursing staff spends 10-30% of their time searching for equipment Servicing an item takes 8 hours because 75% of the time is spent searching for it Assets are not serviced and maintained when required Hospitals are having a difficult time complying with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and FDA regulations on equipment maintenance Critical staff can not be located quickly Equipment is lost and stolen

Considering that the average cost of a mobile biomedical device is $3,000 along with the additional hourly employee wage, it is obvious that the ability to instantly locate a mobile asset would have a major positive financial impact. Such a solution would provide the following benefits:

Management of personnel, bed, equipment and systems capacity is efficient Nursing staff can spend time with patients instead of searching for equipment or staff Purchasing can reduce capital expenditures and equipment leases Biomedical department can locate equipment for preventative maintenance

Now, for the first time, technology is available to effectively manage mobile assets cost-effectively in real time. A real time locator system (RTLS) utilizes RFID and leverages your 802.11 WLAN so no proprietary infrastructure is required. The application provides a visual representation of your environment with assets displayed and identified on this map. Users can easily navigate from one location to another or use the advanced search and filter capabilities to locate an asset or a specific type of asset. The most powerful feature is the ability to provide notifications based on events and rules you create based on your business workflow. In addition, the application allows users to record and store historical data and provides easy access to this data through powerful reporting and analysis features. Other benefits include the ability of the infrastructure to support data and voice in addition to the location-aware application and that the solution can integrate with other healthcare-specific applications.

Many hospitals have already implemented or are currently looking at implementing this technology to drive down costs. The technology is mature and non-proprietary and the ROI of implementing this solution is substantial and relatively quick. For a standard 500 bed hospital with 3000 tracked assets, the first year savings in equipment and productivity on average is over $1,000,000. Let BlueBean show you how RTLS and RFID can improve patient care while reducing costs today.