A regional hospital curbed medical equipment losses with asset tracking. By implementing indoor asset tracking for key medical equipment, the hospital was reduce their medical equipment costs by 25%. . The first use case was focused on patient transfer mattresses and quickly expanded to infusion pumps and wheelchairs. Through creative and innovative use of BLE/LoRaWAN enabled beacons and moving the asset tracking algorithms to the cloud, the result is a single IoT infrastructure and platform that can add and scale multiple asset tracking use cases rapidly.
32% of Organizations that have implemented an IoT solution failed because of the “High Cost of Scaling” – Microsoft
The Problem
On a daily basis, a hospital staff is challenged by locating needed assets like infusion pumps and wheelchairs in order to provide safe healthcare services for their patients. There is not a day that goes by when there is a patient in need of an infusion pump and the staff has to scramble to find one. In most cases, there is available inventory – it’s just not where it’s supposed to be, or it’s not available due to cleaning or maintenance. In some cases, assets like patient transfer mattresses are mistakenly thrown out or leave with EMS responders never to return. The results are wasted time trying to find critical equipment, loss of expensive assets and a threat to patient safety. The hospital needed a solution that was easy to use, accurate and did not cost more than the assets that needed tracking.
On Average Hospitals lose 10 to 25% of their ‘mobile’ assets on an annual basis representing an annual loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Approach
The Results
By leveraging their initial IoT infrastructure investment, the hospital was able to maximize their ROI by increasing hospital safety and limiting loss of critical assets. The hospital staff no longer wastes time trying to find critical equipment or compiling data for compliance reporting. It is estimated that the platform will save at least 25% in annual equipment loss costs.