Hospital Asset Tracking and Management
Having to manage different types of expensive mobile hospital equipment is both challenging and time-consuming. A substantial amount of asset items can get lost, stolen or misplaced, heavily affecting productivity every day.
More than thirty percent of nurses spend a minimum of 1 hour per shift searching for hospital equipment. The average medium hospital owns 20,000 pieces of hospital equipment/assets with the NHS losing £13,000,000 from equipment lost, misplaced or stolen each year (according to Freedom of Information replies from 113 NHS trusts).
Having all hospital assets tagged means it is easier to locate items currently owned by the hospital. It reduces the need to rent or purchase additional equipment. The condition of the hospital assets can also be identified when the items are tagged and details recorded when tracking the hospital equipment to ensure servicing is done in a timely manner so the equipment is not out of use at any time.
The advantages of asset tagging:
- The location of expensive equipment is kept track of.
- Monitoring assets with location-based tags will improve usage of equipment and reduce unnecessary rental expenses.
- It prevents theft or misplacement of items.
- The tags can allow for missing equipment alerts which go off after a set period of time.
- Asset movement history can be tracked which improves efficiencies; it can be observed which departments are using equipment, and when.