Healthcare systems in the United States face several challenges, from supply chain issues to overspending on assets due to poor utilization and tracking. These problems contribute to wasted resources and unnecessary costs that negatively impact your margins. Fortunately, Kontakt.io offers innovative technology solutions to maximize your supply chain on one easy platform that also works to increase staff safety and improve patient satisfaction.

In this article, we learn valuable insights from Christy West. During her 20 years in the field, she has helped many hospitals maximize their supply chain, drive contract compliance, and use RTLS and RFID solutions to achieve data-driven decisions for standardization initiatives.

Supply Chain Challenges

Labor shortages in the U.S. have driven up labor costs, which has increased the cost of raw materials and consumer goods. These factors contribute to rising healthcare costs across the nation, which double the world average per capita.

Hospitals today can be very siloed. Different departments have different budgets with a lack of visibility between them. This increases bottlenecks and raises costs. The key is to help all departments work together from an asset flow perspective so that clinical engineering (Biomed), materials management, supply chain, contract management, and clinical staff can all work together.

Average Avoidable Costs

The average 200-bed hospital raises about $2.2 million in avoidable costs annually. Factors that contribute to these numbers include:

• Over 3,000 employee hours are spent on manual searches for medical devices each year, leading to half a million dollars in lost productivity.
• 65% of high-volume devices like IV pumps are not utilized at any given time, resulting in about $1.5 million in capital loss.
• The average hospital loses over 4% of small Telemetry devices annually. The cost of replenishment and delay in patient care is around $150,000 per year.
• Rental equipment not returned in time can cost a hospital $200,000 per year in late fees.

Lack of Asset Visibility

One of the biggest contributors to avoidable costs is poor asset management. Overall equipment utilization is as low as 35-40% across the U.S. Many hospitals are reconciling current inventory from initial purchases. For example, you may have bought 500 pumps and now can only account for 430. Without access to the correct data, you can only estimate shrinkage numbers.

Not having data to access your equipment also results in overbuying. One department may have extra assets they could share with another running low. However, the lack of asset visibility means the shorted department buys new equipment while the overstocked department has unused assets.

Maximizing Your Supply Chain

The solution is to give visibility to your assets through data-driven decision-making for your supply chain. Implementing an RTLS system and having access to real data allows hospitals to break down silos to achieve:

• Right size inventory
• Right size par levels
• Reduce hoarding
• Give staff access to necessary equipment when they need it

An asset tracking RTLS system gives you visibility to your tagged assets’ location and real-time observations into the supply chain to improve low equipment utilization. When you maximize the utilization of your current fleet, you can avoid wasting money on purchasing unnecessary items. Departments can share unused supplies with departments in need instead of paying for new assets. Asset tracking for rental equipment helps you avoid high rental costs or late fees by keeping the right size inventory on hand.

Kontakt.io’s Application Suite

Kontakt.io customers see a minimum of 20% increase in equipment utilization using our asset tracking RTLS system. One dashboard gives you visibility to all of the assets in your fleet. You also have the visibility to see the utilization rates of assets and transfer them between hospitals according to need. A few practical applications include:

• IV Pump Management: Use the dashboard for IV pump workflow automation, real-time location visibility, and par-level history.
• Asset Tracking: Get real-time inventory data of medical devices using a map view or list view and access location history reports.

Asset tracking and management can save significant amounts of money. As an example, the average purchase price of an IV pump is about $3,500. If you avoid purchasing just 100 of these devices, you save $350,000.

Trackers effectively reallocate thousands of assets, returning thousands of man-hours to your staff to focus on caring for patients. Now they can locate an asset with the click of a button on their phone or laptop.

Increasing Purchasing Power

Data-driven decisions allow you to make informed choices that streamline your processes and conserve assets. Once you have the data, it can help with many standardization initiatives, including:

• Minimize vendors: Spend less time in contract negotiations and management, increase purchasing power, and access better pricing tiers.
• GPO compliance: Get higher rebates and better pricing tiers on your GPL.

Why Choose Kontakt.io?

Kontakt.io has the advantage over legacy RTLS for many reasons:

• Easy to use: Kontakt.io utilizes a cloud platform, a modular location engine using ML, and AI-driven actions.
• Fastest ROI: 12x faster time to value with an ROI of six months or less.
• Unmatched scalability: For example, if you want to cover 1,000 of your assets today, we can install and have you ready to go in about a month. Then in 6 months, if you want to cover a thousand employees for staff safety, we can add this to your existing solution and have that up and running in less than a month.

These benefits vastly overshadow the negative aspects of legacy RTLS:

• Complicated: Legacy RFID platforms used complex point solutions.
• Expensive: High upfront costs, complex and slow installation of 12 to 18 months, and high ongoing operating costs.
• Not scalable: Pricing and architecture don’t scale to all use-cases sites.

Kontakt.io is also inclusive of all hospital types, big or small, making it an ideal solution for healthcare systems of all sizes, even those undergoing expansion. We can provide health systems with a single platform to focus on the entire inpatient journey, with all use cases integrated from the patient experience to staff safety to asset management. One vendor does it all. One solution combines all analytics to help your hospital optimize work processes for better results.

Smart Hospital IoT Use Cases

Some of the many use cases that apply with Kontakt.io’s platform include:

• Increase reimbursements and reduce CapEx & OpEx for increased profit margins.
• Improve staff productivity and reduce turnovers.
• Improve patient satisfaction.
• Real-time visibility, increased utilization, and loss prevention for medical devices.
• Staff safety, staff journey analytics, nurse call, hand hygiene, and bed capacity management for staff.
• Patient safety, reduced wait times, indoor navigation, and better patient satisfaction.

Fast Time to Value

Kontakt.io’s solutions take just 30 days to install and six months to see ROI. You get a health system built to size with cloud and AI that is highly scalable. Our Smart 360 includes turnkey installation, asset tagging, and end-to-end delivery service. Our solutions are ideal for hospital employees responsible for efficient asset management and cost-saving initiatives

Watch our information webinar on-demand to learn more about the current challenges healthcare systems face, and how Kontakt.io’s digital technology provides advantageous solutions to solve these problems. We use AI and IoT signals to provide real-time data to anticipate needs, reduce waste, improve efficiency, and optimize your processes, effectively solving over 20 use cases using a single platform.