N-Smart IoT Asset Management Solution for Healthcare
Introduction
Healthcare providers aim to meet high standards of patient care and safety. Today, hospitals and healthcare facilities face increased patient volume and higher expectations. To meet the evolving demands, hospitals must eliminate wasted steps and create more efficient, streamlined workflows.
One of the key aspects of efficient healthcare workflow is asset tracking and management. When medical staff strive to offer accurate, timely patient care, they cannot be expected to locate vital medical devices. Benefits of efficient asset management are not limited to time and money. In the US, before the pandemic, medical errors were the third leading cause of death. The ability to provide the right care at the right time is critical. IoT asset management helps to minimize errors and improve efficiencies by providing accurate asset information and sensor-enabled environmental safety controls.
This article showcases how IoT asset management helped a large hospital to achieve these results.
Challenges
Nivid recently deployed an IoT based asset management solution for one of the largest healthcare providers in the US with more than 74,000 employees and 250,000+ medical assets across multiple sites. The company was facing multiple challenges with managing assets.
As their large number of assets are spread across various sites, it was difficult to accurately locate them at a given point in time. Hospital staff were finding it difficult to maintain the exact count and location of high value assets. Medical staff were spending extra cycles locating medical equipment like portable ultrasound machines, diagnostic and laboratory equipment which were often shared by the nurses and physicians. Tracking equipment at the time of use led to delays, inconvenience, and errors. There was also a lack of capability to track housekeeping equipment. Manual tracking using spreadsheets and documents was time-consuming and inaccurate.
Monitoring and managing asset inventory instigated additional challenges. The sheer number of medical and non-medical equipment requires regular monitoring to plan for replacement and maintenance. Inability to accurately track and predict depletion, repairs, etc. led to inefficient workflows. These inefficiencies increased operational costs, wasted cycles, and exposed risks of potential hazards.
Another challenge was ensuring medical grade safety and sterilization standards. For critical medical procedures and in ICU rooms, the air quality and surfaces should achieve the desired pathogenic control. Determining the level of sterilization manually is cumbersome and error-prone. A digital solution to centrally monitor and manage these safety factors are highly desirable and effective.
N-Smart IoT Asset Management Solution for Healthcare
We delivered N-Smart’s highly versatile Healthcare Smart Assets solution for our client. This IoT-based solution uses BLE tags for high value assets. BLE tags enable tracking the assets in real time. The solution provides a cloud-agnostic, role-based, web-based portal for hospital administrators to centrally monitor and manage the assets across the various sites of our client. Care givers, nurses, and physicians could locate medical equipment using platform-agnostic (iOS, Android) mobile devices. The solution provided all stakeholders with an accurate, synchronized view of asset location in real time.
A central dashboard provided facility managers and medical supervisors asset inventory at any point of time. This allowed them to plan for replacements and maintenance. The real-time asset performance data for medical equipment gave usage history, maintenance, and repair history. Service managers could use this information to schedule repairs proactively. This reduced risks of malfunctioning devices, and related operational costs and hazards.
To track environmental conditions in hospital facilities, the IoT solution uses moisture sensors to detect and determine surface and air quality. Facility managers and medical cleaning professionals can monitor the dwell time information to ensure they achieve the desired pathogenic control and safety standards set by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other medical regulations.
Features and Benefits
Features | Benefits |
| Equipment tracking and inventory management (tag, classify, track, trace, and manage) | Reduce wasted cycles of manual equipment tracking. Improved efficiency of operations. Increased hospital staff productivity. Reduced safety risks. Improved patient experience at the hospital. |
| Repair history monitoring for maintenance planning | Improved equipment condition and extend equipment lifetime. |
| Remote monitoring/management of medical equipment stock | Timely replacement and maintenance improved operations and reduced cost of last-minute ordering. |
| Safety controls | Continuous monitoring and alerts on dwell time for improved patient safety. Compliance to medical sterilization and safety standards. |
Results
N-Smart’s IoT asset management solution helped our healthcare client to reduce operational costs by 20-30% with improved visibility of assets. It enabled them to improve operational efficiency and reduce workforce costs by lowering resource needs to manually monitor inventory. Medical staff could invest their time on ensuring superior medical patient care.
Connect with us
For more information about how N-Smart’s IoT Asset Management solution can help you achieve your business goals as a healthcare provider, contact our team of experts.