Asset tracking has become an essential part of inventory management.
Asset tracking enables all actors involved from medical devices manufacturers to hospitals to quickly and precisely locate people and things – so-called assets – within their facilities.
Thanks to tags placed on or embedded in the asset and connected to an IoT system, tracking happens automatically, helping hospital personnel, inventory managers and manufacturers in many ways. Driving sustainability is one of the unspoken benefits of asset tracking solutions. This article discusses how.

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Smart asset tracking helps optimize inventory management.

When it comes to asset tracking, IoT enables efficient data storage, processing and analysis. Instead of manually tracking down assets within the hospital, automated reports are generated, thus helping to identify how medical equipment is used and moved, which piece of medical equipment is frequently utilized and which is not. Inventory managers can then make informed decisions regarding investments, avoiding unnecessary manufacturing or expenses and allocating resources more soundly. As one of the key pillars of any sustainable development policy is minimization, meaning procuring only what is needed by assessing the users’ needs, smart asset tracking is a key compound of the improvement of sustainability across the healthcare industry.

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Smart asset tracking contributes to hospital waste reduction.

Hospitals must manage the quality of durable medical assets and multiple-use medical devices such as surgical instruments over time. Identifying manually which assets require maintenance or replacement is costly as well as time-consuming and may lack accuracy. Worse still, some reusable medical devices may be discarded while they haven’t reached their maximum number of uses.
Thanks to IoMT and to tracking systems, the way assets are used every day is optimized, hence improving waste management within the hospital.

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Smart asset tracking furthers infection prevention

One of the main pain points for inventory managers is missing or misplaced medical equipment. It costs money but can also cost lives. Surgical instruments left inside the patient after surgery can lead to severe infections, if not death. It is estimated that 1,500 cases of retained surgical bodies (RSB) could be avoided every year in the U.S.
Smart tracking of surgical instruments enables a precise inventory of tools before and after a procedure, hence preventing hospital-acquired infections.

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Improving sustainability is at the top of most industries’ corporate agenda, and the healthcare sector is no exception. The good news is that digital solutions have the potential to create significant sustainability upsides. By minimizing the quantity of assets used while maximizing their use, smart asset tracking solutions meet many of the sustainability goals of medical devices manufacturers and hospitals in the 21st century.

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