There are so many unprecedented pressures on healthcare facilities these days as adequate staffing continues to be a major challenge, medical devices are vulnerable, and even how devices are manufactured is changing. Due to a global pandemic, the industry has had to pivot and find new, innovative ways to treat patients while also tackling these problems as part of their day-to-day.
Nothing can replace the value healthcare workers provide so it’s unfortunate they’re bogged down with time-consuming, manual tasks (like trying to find the right equipment) that could otherwise be spent on patient care. And the reality is that solutions already exist to alleviate some of these burdens, but keeping accurate track of device location, integrity, and quantity is still a widespread problem. Specialized (and costly) medical equipment needs to be located at a moment’s notice and, if not managed properly, the time wasted trying to find it could have a serious impact on the quality of patient care.
Automation saves time and dramatically reduces waste
With very little time between patients and an overextended staff, locating these critical devices should be the last thing healthcare workers have to worry about. In fact, frontline care workers and hospital staff spend at least 10% of their time navigating operational failures due to insufficient equipment and supplies.
Technology has helped healthcare facilities with these burdens for years by using real-time location systems (RTLS) to track assets such as beds and other expensive equipment. But, in the digital age, active RFID asset tracking in hospital settings has become an essential part of improving patient services, while also reducing costs and preventing shortfalls as well as over-stocking. In other words, hospitals can avoid overbuying costly assets simply because they can’t find them.
Now, with over a million deployed wireless sensors, the RF Code engineering team has expanded development to also design optimized solutions for monitoring lights-out edge compute resources.
With RF Code’s new Sentry solution, we have built the industry’s first and only platform purpose-built for monitoring and management of geographically dispersed, unstaffed, and physically non-secure edge/remote IT locations.
3 ways automating asset management improves patient care
Automating asset management not only provides operational and financial benefits, it can also improve patient care in the following three ways:
- Supporting faster treatments – identifying the exact location of life-saving equipment in real-time can save precious minutes (or even seconds) and allows more time for healthcare workers to focus on patients and their needs.
- Ensuring quality treatments – by proactively monitoring for potential equipment failures (and even environmental factors that could negatively affect them), assets can be kept in optimal working condition to ensure quality care.
- Making safety a priority – hospitals have to deal with laws and regulations so having the ability to quickly, and accurately, compile safety-related data to meet compliance also takes the pressure off the audit process.
By automating time-consuming, mundane, and repetitive tasks (such as admin), healthcare workers can use that time back to focus on patients while knowing they have access to the right resources and equipment they need to do their job—to provide the best quality patient care possible.
