When an IV pump or other piece of mobile equipment is recalled or due for preventive maintenance, the hardest part of your job is finding it.
How much time do you spend searching the whole hospital looking for those secret hiding places where nurses stash equipment?
You’ve heard about real-time locating systems and know that RTLS would make your job easier – you just need to convince leadership to make the investment.
The key is proving its worth it not only for your own workflow efficiency, but also hospital-wide. Here are 5 tips you can use to put your hospital on the right path.
1. Put Patient Safety at the Forefront
When equipment is recalled, it can take days to find it in your hospital. During that time, patient safety may be at risk. The same can be said for equipment that is overdue for preventive maintenance. If you can’t find it to maintain it, you never know if it will end up in use with a patient. The right RTLS not only helps you track assets, it also proactively alerts you if recalled or out-of-maintenance equipment enters patient care areas.
2. Make It About Supporting Nurses & Patient Care
If equipment hoarding is an issue in your hospital, think about its root cause. Nurses can’t afford the time it takes to hunt for IV pumps or other critical equipment; their job is to give the highest quality of care to patients. So they stash units away where they can be found when they need them.
What if this equipment was always available to nurses? The right RTLS offers the ability to manage par levels of equipment, sending proactive alerts when units are over- or under-stocked with IV pumps, wheelchairs, or other equipment. This enables distribution to efficiently manage the mobile equipment fleet and eliminate the root cause of hoarding altogether. And, this means patient care isn’t delayed due to equipment availability.
3. Explain the ROI of Asset Utilization
Your mobile equipment fleet represents a significant investment of capital expenditure. Hospitals typically purchase 20% more assets than they actually need, just to ensure they can be found. Meanwhile, much of this valuable investment sits idle — or worse, gets forever lost in a maze of hallways and hiding places. The right RTLS offers inventory management tools to “right-size” your fleet and historical analytics to better inform purchasing decisions.
By way of example, PeaceHealth in Oregon immediately saved $600,000 through cost avoidance once they implemented par-level asset management. When they were able to understand how many IV pumps they already had and how they were being used (or not used), they knew the order they were about to place was unnecessary.
Further, by using the par-level workflow tools to better manage the flow of pumps in real time, the hospital was able to actually reduce their fleet by 26 percent and eliminate their rental program, saving a staggering $2.7 million dollars on IV pumps alone. For more on PeaceHealth’s success, download their case study at versustech.com/assets.
4. Understand Your Existing Infrastructure
The investment to bring RTLS into your hospital may be less than leadership realizes. In fact, you might already have an existing RTLS installed as part of your nurse call system. If your nurses wear locating badges that automate nurse presence when they walk into patient rooms, you already have infrastructure that can be leveraged for asset tracking. What’s more, you can utilize your Wi-Fi network for zone-level locating. The right RTLS can leverage what you already have in place and build upon it to meet your facility’s goals.
5. Demonstrate How RTLS Can Be Leveraged Hospital-wide
Hospitals across the U.S. are using RTLS to achieve operational efficiency well beyond asset tracking. The right RTLS allows hospitals to take a building-block approach, starting with Wi-Fi asset tracking and adding precision locating where necessary. Hospitals can add on applications as they need them to create a complete operational intelligence platform that aids with not only asset workflow, but also staff workflow and patient flow in the ED, OR and hospital-wide (see sidebar), increasing capacity and improving the patient experience.
Your hospital’s RTLS infrastructure is an important investment that can have a wide-ranging, positive impact on operations. To get RTLS approved for the biomed team, bring your leadership the whole picture. Help them understand how the right RTLS allows you to start with asset tracking, then easily and economically grow into more advanced applications.
For additional information about Versus, visit www.VersusTech.com.