Real Time Asset Location Systems have benefits for different applications across many industries.
The benefits to healthcare providers are significant and wide ranging, depending on which applications are selected.
Benefits include:
- Increased Productivity of Front-Line Staff & Maintenance Staff
- Improved Asset Utilisation
- Reduced Wastage
- Improved Compliance Adherence
- Improved Procurement Decision Making
With the adoption of a system that gives staff more time to focus on their day job, softer benefits, such as an improvement in patient care, should also be expected.
Increased Productivity
A key driver for deploying an RTLS system in healthcare environments is increased staff productivity. This applies to both front-line staff and maintenance staff.
At TracLogik, we often hear anecdotal evidence of front-line staff being tied up by searching for equipment. Being able to find equipment in a timely manner has very obvious benefits in an emergency situation. More often than not though, we hear of staff spending their downtime searching large departments for equipment. It’s never where it was left, it’s often in use by someone else, or it’s away for scheduled maintenance.
For the maintenance staff the challenges are similar. Imagine being part of the maintenance team tasked with servicing equipment. Hundreds of items, spread across tens of wards each with a different service, cleaning and calibration schedule. The first job is to locate the asset that needs work – which can take hours.
TracLogik’s asset tracking and management system puts an end to this – it enables all staff to find the equipment they need within a couple of clicks. Equipment can even be marked as in use to ensure everyone can see the status, ahead of going to track it down.
Improved Asset Utilisation
The challenges described above are often exacerbated by the fact that equipment is often lent to other departments. Perhaps it’s not immediately returned, and it’s stored, unused until a situation requires someone spends (often significant) time looking for it.
By knowing immediately where your equipment is, even if it has gone to another department it makes everyone’s life easier and ensures a better level of asset utilisation.
Reduced Wastage
Extending your asset tracking and management system to tracking consumable items often seems like a level of expense that’s not required. Often, this is true. Hospitals have rigorous processes to ensure that consumable items are not used after their use-by dates, however by joining up consumable stock control and ordering those charged with ensuring that enough consumable items are on order have a real-time insight into the rate of use and when the reordering should take place, to ensure that consumable items are not wasted.
Improved Compliance Adherence
Hospitals are full of devices that need regular servicing, cleaning calibration and other forms of maintenance. Patient risk is increased when equipment is not maintained correctly according to the prescribed schedule.
With TracLogik’s healthcare asset tracking and management system, each asset can have a customised maintenance schedule built in, with records attached to document each instance of maintenance, cleaning or calibration, and with the asset location information always available, those charged with performing this maintenance will be able to complete their work much quicker and more efficiently.
Improved Procurement Decision Making
Understanding asset utilisation and availability means that procurement decisions can be informed by hard data, rather than anecdotal evidence.
Consider the example of syringe drivers used by both acute and community based palliative care teams. Often the community team won’t have available syringe drivers for new patients, however the acute team are overstocked. Using TracLogik’s healthcare asset tracking and management system, this imbalance can be easily detected and remedied, ensuring better patient care without spending extra money on the procurement of new devices.
