A nurse goes to leave the room of her patient to find an infusion pump. She checks the supply room. The infusion pump isn't there, so she goes to ask a colleague who also hasn't seen it. She then walks down two hallways and then through two other wards before finding the pump in the hallway at the end of a two-story-tall building. This search took her seven minutes.
However, if we think about this nurse having to spend a minimum of 30 minutes a day searching for equipment, not only will thousands of hours of valuable time lost be wasted on this problem in only a week. This is the problem hospitals are facing. Now the leading hospitals are finding solutions for it by utilizing asset tracking technology.
The Scale of the Problem
The problem of hospitals losing money, time, and resources is that hospitals are an extremely asset-intensive work environment. Hospitals have thousands of individual machines like wheelchairs, ventilators, portable monitors, IV poles and surgical tools.
All of these tools are moving all of the time and the nurses don't always know where the tool is and it always seems to end up somewhere unexpected. Studies are consistently showing that nurses are spending anywhere between thirty minutes and two hours of their shifts just trying to locate equipment that they need, this is not time they are spending with their patients, on their charting or on their training, it is time wasted walking the halls.
Because staffing levels in this profession is so strained and understaffed, this time and money is really going to waste. Because equipment cannot be found by many people, and because procurement departments don't know where the tools are at all times hospitals can end up owning three times more equipment than is actually needed and because no one knows where anything is, none of that equipment is being used at any given time.
RTLS and BLE: The Technology
The technology that is making a huge difference in hospitals is called RTLS, or Real-Time Location Systems. This system is put in place by utilizing BLE, or Bluetooth Low Energy, beacons that can be placed on machines and can track where those machines are in real time. The way this works is by taking the BLE beacons, attaching them to all of the equipment that a hospital needs, and placing receivers around the hospital in each of the rooms.
This is linked to a main hub that triangulates the information coming from the beacons and can show where the equipment is at any given time on a screen. With this technology, a nurse doesn't need to take seven minutes to find the infusion pump, they only need to look at the screen and will be told where the pump is, in Room 214. This could change the time nurses need to search for items from seven minutes down to a mere thirty seconds.
With RTLS, a hospital can collect and analyze how equipment is being utilized, which equipment isn't being utilized enough and what machines are missing at any given time and the hospital can use this information to know what equipment needs to be purchased.
The Patient Care Connection
The connection between tracking hospital equipment and patient care is clear. By cutting down on the amount of time nurses spend searching for equipment, they can spend more time directly interacting with their patients. When the nurse has the equipment needed when it is needed, their patients can be taken care of in a faster and safer way, and when the equipment needs to be repaired according to how often it has been used rather than on how often the nurse thinks it should be used it can actually increase the efficiency. Asset tracking in a hospital setting isn't an operational improvement that back-end staff can make, it is an initiative taken to improve the patients care.
Purpose-Built for High-Stakes Environments
This kind of technology must be accurate, efficient and completely compliance ready for hospital environments. AssetTrackPro is designed specifically for these circumstances and provides asset tracking by utilizing both RFID and BLE technology to give hospitals real-time information regarding their equipment as well as information on the usage levels and alerts regarding when the machines need to be repaired.
Consider trying AssetTrackPro and giving the nurses and doctors back the time they need to do their jobs effectively.
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