It’s no surprise that hospitals, medical practices—and the healthcare field, in general—need to use every minute to their advantage in order to stay effective and efficient. Spending unnecessary time tracking down pieces of medical equipment or having to find a last-minute replacement for a healthcare device due to improper maintenance issues doesn’t exactly fit into that productivity model. That’s why a healthcare asset tracking system can be of tremendous benefit to such organizations, not to mention the immediate ROI of 275% if they implement an asset tracking system.
Quick Links:
- What Is Healthcare Asset Tracking?
- Common Healthcare Asset Management Challenges
- 3 Benefits of a Healthcare Asset Tracking System
What Is Healthcare Asset Tracking?
As the name suggests, healthcare asset tracking entails utilizing GPS tracking technologies to locate and monitor various pieces of medical equipment and healthcare devices. Healthcare asset tracking systems can be managed in a comprehensive dashboard that allows all pertinent parties to access the information they need to make the best decisions. By tracking medical equipment and healthcare devices over time, you can understand how and where your assets are most used.
Common examples of assets include:
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- Equipment
- Machinery
- Medication
- Medical and biohazard waste
- Employees
- IT hardware
An asset tracking system can be implemented to give you insight into the operations of your healthcare facility like never before.
Common Healthcare Asset Management Challenges
When you’re responsible for managing expensive equipment that is prone to constantly relocating, maintenance requirements, and more, there are some challenges along the way; these include the following:
Risk of Stolen Equipment
A recent study found that an estimated $4,000 worth of equipment per hospital bed is lost or stolen every year; for a facility with 300 rooms, that’s a monumental $1.2 million declared missing without much chance of it ever returning. It goes without saying, but healthcare workers cannot perform their important duties without the equipment they need. Not only does missing medical equipment significantly impact the productivity of your healthcare staff, but it also diminishes the quality of patient care and eats up a large portion of your financial bottom line when you’re having to constantly replace equipment.
Maintenance Scheduling
When you’re managing dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of healthcare assets, it’s nearly impossible to manually keep track of maintenance records for every single piece. However, without knowing when a medical device needs to get a new battery or when a large piece of machinery is starting to show signs of breaking down, your operations can come to a halt when you least expect it. Keeping so many various items up and running smoothly is a massive undertaking unto itself, but one that is vital to continue delivering quality care to your patients.
Unknown Location & Environmental Factors
One study from 2018 found that nurses waste up to 6,000 hours of precious time each month trying to track down lost equipment; this huge amount of time breaks down to roughly one hour each shift spent hunting down the medical devices they need. Not only is this incredibly unproductive and harmful to an efficient workflow, but it also means that nurses’ time is diverted from delivering care or managing more important tasks.
Keeping medications—or other environmentally sensitive pieces of equipment—at an appropriate temperature is another huge challenge when it comes to managing healthcare assets. If your sensitive assets aren’t stored in the proper conditions they’re meant to be in, then you risk losing them altogether if they are no longer viable. Just as the aforementioned challenges, though, it can be nearly impossible to individually check and ensure your devices are stored as they should be!
3 Benefits of a Healthcare Asset Tracking System
Luckily, these challenges can be a thing of the past with the implementation of a healthcare asset tracking system to help you effectively manage all the assets you need to with benefits including:
Secure Medical Assets
Utilizing healthcare asset tracking solutions saves you time and money, plus the headache of forever losing those devices. Medical equipment isn’t cheap and you have a budget to stick to for each year; missing items can significantly cut into the financial state of your organization. With an asset tracking system designed to continuously broadcast the exact location of your medical devices and other healthcare equipment, you’ll never have to wonder where your assets are and your staff can focus on more important aspects of their work. In fact, the use of asset management solutions can reduce the equipment search time from 30 minutes to 2 mins. Automated tracking solutions can give you peace of mind and safeguard your financial bottom line.
Automate Maintenance
Worried about if your equipment needs a new battery or can’t remember when it was last evaluated for maintenance repair? Healthcare asset tracking can remember all of it for you with automated maintenance reminders and notifications that your equipment is in need of attention before it spontaneously breaks down. Maintenance alerts enable you to communicate with the user of a loaned medical device about the status of the equipment, which can be an indicator of device handling or misuse.
Gain Valuable Insight Into the Status of Your Assets
With healthcare asset tracking solutions, you can learn how and where your equipment is being used in order to make educated budgeting and resource allocation decisions. This insight is incredibly valuable for monitoring historical usage patterns, learning which pieces of equipment you need to stock up on due to increased demand, aligning budgetary constraints with the best investments to make, and more. The benefits of enhanced patient care that accrue from RFID are estimated at $165.12 billion and for good reason: comprehensive insight into all of your healthcare assets at once is a game-changer for the healthcare industry.
Let Rastrac Streamline Your Healthcare Asset Management Operations!
Implementing top-of-the-line GPS asset tracking systems can help you streamline your healthcare asset management tasks, which tremendously saves you time and money while improving overall utilization. Having easy access to telematics data from a GPS tracking device gives you better control of your healthcare organization’s high-value assets.
Rastrac has been trusted since 1993 to track valuable assets and we’re here to help transform how you manage your medical assets! We offer a variety of customizable medical tracking solutions to be as flexible as your schedule and talent need it to be. Our systems are designed to work seamlessly with your operations—not hinder them.
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