How Supply Chain Agent Helps Hospitals Buy Fewer Assets
When it comes to equipment, hospitals face a gap between supply and demand, and between operational and clinical teams and workflows. This disconnect has consequences: vital assets are unevenly distributed, hard to find and retrieve, and difficult to orchestrate and manage.
The result: hospital employees continue to spend considerable time searching for devices. One Kaiser Permanente study of 767 nurses across 36 med-surg units found that they spent up to 36 minutes hunting for necessary equipment. Another report surveyed 774 nurses across 23 hospitals, and discovered that equipment searches accounted for 26.2% of all operational failures (a rate of 1.59 per shift).
But it’s not just nurses and other frontline employees who suffer; financial margins are also impacted. While there are no exact numbers on the monetary costs of renting or purchasing duplicate equipment, researchers estimate that up to 46% of hospitals rent equipment. At the same time, many hospitals and IDNs still struggle with underutilized equipment, often stemming from poor coordination.
Clearly, this issue affects both IDNs and employees. But what if hospital systems could remove this overhead? This could return up to one hour per shift for up to one-third of all nurses, increase equipment utilization, and trim excess expenses significantly.
In fact, the equipment shortage issue is systemic but solvable. Supply Chain Agent is already in beta testing at hospitals, where it has reduced equipment rentals by 76%; increased equipment utilization by 1.8 times; decreased nurse search times by 89%; and finally, decreased pump:bed ratios by 30%.
Supply Chain Agent helps hospitals achieve these metrics by:
Taking a Systemic, Top-Down Approach to Equipment
The root of the problem lies in a fragmented, disjointed approach to equipment and supply chain management. Equipment may be siloed by units, departments, and facilities; one wing may have too many ventilators, unaware that several floors down, another wing could use those excess devices.
Equipment can also be lost in the shuffle. For instance, if a pump is transferred with a patient from one hospital to another within the same network, it’s likely that the original hospital will never see that pump again.
Instead, hospitals (and IDNs) have to take a unified, system-level strategy. Supply Chain Agent is not just another dashboard or real-time equipment tracker; instead, it orchestrates and coordinates equipment at scale, cutting through silos and unifying operations across units, hospitals, and networks.
Using RTLS to Inform Orchestration
However, because RTLSes transmit data on device and location, they determine where a device currently is, which is only half the question. Even with a capable RTLS, nurses will have to track down devices manually, which can add minutes or hours during a time-sensitive, life-or-death situation.
Instead, hospitals need to answer the other part of the equation: orchestration, or the when, how, and the who. When is this device needed? Who is the person best positioned to transport the device? How can we optimize routing so that this device is retrieved in an efficient manner?
That’s where Supply Chain Agent excels: it builds off RTLS data, using equipment location and status to coordinate delivery, intelligently batching tasks and efficiently routing employees, so they don’t have to run back and forth constantly.
For instance, the Med-Surg wing needs two pumps and three monitors; the PACU has three extra monitors, and two more pumps are sitting in storage. If the Supply Chain Agent senses that Nurse Myra is bringing a patient to the PACU, it can ask her to bring back the monitors when she returns to Med-Surg, and assign another technician in the vicinity to bring the pumps on his way back to Med-Surg.
Bringing Just-in-Time Procedures to Healthcare
The just-in-time (JIT) methodology was pioneered by Toyota to manage massive, complex manufacturing ecosystems. JIT essentially matches demand and supply, ensuring that money, time, and effort are not wasted.
The key prerequisite to JIT is accurate forecasting, which relies heavily on historical data. Within the Kontakt.io platform, Patient Journey Analytics, our foundational intelligence layer, fuses historical EHR data and up-to-date RTLS data to predict periods of peak demand, common AI care pathways, and indicators of patient surges.
Supply Chain Agent then ingests these insights and converts intelligence into action, staging equipment, optimizing tasking and scheduling, and ensuring availability. This removes the possibility of shortages, decreases operational and financial waste, and equally important, helps nurses pivot away from hoarding behaviors; after all, if equipment is always there when necessary, why stash anything for a rainy day?
Rightsizing resources
On a hospital- or network-level, implementing a JIT mindset also rightsizes resources. In terms of expenditures, it will always be cheaper to run smaller fleets with higher utilization, in contrast to larger fleets of devices that are more rarely used.
This also cuts out the need for rentals, thus saving more money. In essence, a hospital or IDN will rent from itself: the NICU might borrow beds from the PACU, while the PACU might borrow ventilators from Med-Surg. Of course, these intra-hospital “rentals” are free; while they do incur operational costs such as employee time, Supply Chain Agent can easily minimize this overhead by orchestrating equipment at scale.
Conclusion
Instead of another map or dashboard, hospitals need an engine that predicts demand and coordinates equipment movements across rooms, wings, and networks. By fusing RTLS data with precise forecasts, Supply Chain Agent can replace endless hunts and hoarding, reduce rentals and duplicate purchases, and efficiently optimize routes and batch tasks. Supply Chain Agent implements a just-in-time approach to hospital equipment, regaining revenue for IDNs and time for nurses and staff.
