“The challenge facing healthcare isn’t technology. It’s called management control,” – wrote Forbes in 2020, a few months after the pandemic broke out. Since then, the Healthcare industry has gone through many challenges.
Every medical institution is unique, and so are its assets. Better asset tracking leads to better performance – you keep your stuff excellent, know where it should be, and prevent losses and damage, leading to a better patient experience.
Healthcare asset management software development focuses on building innovative solutions that help medical institutions grow, efficiently manage, and have complete visibility on their assets. This article will cover three ways to improve the quality of medical asset management using software development and say “goodbye” to digging through dozens of files to find asset information.
In this article, we’ll discuss:
- The importance of asset management in healthcare
- Challenges in healthcare asset management
- 3 ways to improve the healthcare asset management using software development
- KindGeek expertise in healthcare software development
- Final thoughts
The importance of asset management in healthcare
Since the pandemic broke out, the worldwide healthcare sector has been under enormous strain. Healthcare facilities were challenged to manage a vast amount of medical supplies, equipment, and other resources. Since then, many medical facilities incorporated high-quality healthcare asset management software. However, the healthcare industry has been struggling with effective asset management and resource utilization long before the pandemic made it clear.
There is a great need for more efficient medical asset management processes with so much to keep track of. The staff of healthcare facilities requires a tool that would automate and make it easier to locate medical equipment, manage patient records, and quickly have access to the up-to-date information about the status and location of each piece of equipment. Such a tool would ensure that every staff member can provide high-quality patient care, make quicker decisions, and spend less time looking for the equipment.
We’ve already talked about asset management startups, but let’s dive deeper into the healthcare-focused asset management world.
Challenges in healthcare asset management
Here we’ve highlighted three main challenges that the healthcare industry faces due to the lack of efficient asset management:
Poor equipment management
Without an asset management tool, hospitals and other medical facilities might have difficulty managing the existing equipment and inventory. This issue can impact patient care, waiting times, and even the number of beds available.
Cost loses
Inefficient asset management leads to the lack of resource visibility that, as a result, decreases the productivity of healthcare workers. Typically, a nurse spends 20 minutes per shift trying to search for the equipment, which causes a $500,000 loss in non-productive work. What’s more, asset mismanagement does not only generate extra expenses but also leads to delays when emergencies happen.
Non-compliance with regulatory standards
In the healthcare report, Gartner estimated that “by 2020, the number of medical devices requiring security hardening by a healthcare provider will increase by 45%.” It is not a surprise that the healthcare industry is one of the most attractive spots for hackers. In 2021 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report states that healthcare ranks near the top in the number of data breaches. IoT devices, such as glucometers, electrocardiograms, and drug infusion systems can be potential targets for hackers. Considering the crucial role of such devices for patient care, it is a huge challenge for healthcare facilities to protect the IT infrastructure and comply with regulatory security standards.
3 ways to improve the healthcare asset management using software development
1. Accelerate Response Time and Improve Patient Care
Healthcare asset management software solutions help to quickly identify, locate, fix, and utilize medical equipment. Beds, wheelchairs, IV poles, infusion pumps, ventilators, and heart monitors – all can be managed in the asset management tool. Affixing RTLS tags to each piece of equipment can make it easy to identify its location and availability.
2. Reduce costs by the rise in staff productivity
With asset management for the healthcare system in place, assets can be easily located. This allows medical staff to spend less time tracking down the tools they need.
Asset management software also allows coordinating orders and inventory more efficiently. This can lead to more cost-effective inventory management.
3. Comply with healthcare security regulations
It is up to a hospital team to ensure that medical equipment is inspected and repaired on time to ensure compliance with healthcare security regulations. An asset management software helps hospitals maintain regulatory compliance, assess risks, reduce operating costs and improve operational efficiency within hospital facilities.
Consider Kindgeek Your Trusted Software Development Partner
KindGeek is a medical software solutions development company that builds innovative and secure technological medical software solutions that automate internal processes, enhance the customer experience, and manage medical information more efficiently. We match our engineering culture to your core values to deliver custom healthcare software development services to hospitals, pharmacies, medical and research laboratories, healthcare startups. We build on-demand healthcare apps such as immunization trackers as well as asset management software.
Product-oriented
We want our healthcare customers to succeed with industry-shaping products we build together. We research the market, analyze data, and apply design thinking to develop relevant and problem-solving solutions.
People-first
We recommend starting every project with a discovery phase. We learn about the needs and habits of product users to build easy-to-use, user-oriented products.
Innovative
At KindGeek, we believe in innovations and startups. We constantly add new technologies to our stack to turn the most challenging idea into an innovative medical software development project.
Final Thoughts
In this article, we have covered asset tracking management case studies in healthcare. Healthcare asset management software development focuses on building innovative solutions that help medical institutions grow, efficiently manage, and have complete visibility on their assets. Inefficient asset management leads to the lack of resource visibility that, as a result, decreases the productivity of healthcare workers, non-compliance, and cost losses.