From the October 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


“At the time, we had an inventory of about 500 infusion pumps and we were concerned we would need to buy more,” says Paul Segovis, director of materials management at Ellis Medicine.

Segovis and his team looked at their current distribution process for infusion pumps and found that they had more than enough; the problem had to do with staff not being able to find them because they were either left in rooms or in closets.


“So looking at the process was probably the smartest thing we did to get started and correct things and then in terms of buying new pumps, we realized we didn’t need500 pumps because we could now get them to where they needed to be with a new process,” he says.

Segovis says the hospital was able to get by with 340 new infusion pumps. “Right off the bat we had that savings from not having to buy an additional160 new pumps,” says Segovis. “The savings come from a cost avoidance,
that’s our biggest savings so far.”

There are countless examples from Ellis Medicine—and many other hospitals that have installed RTLS—about how asset tracking has saved money.

According to Charlotte Miller, director of nursing informatics at Stanley Healthcare Solutions, which acquired AeroScout this past June, managing par levels gets at the most basic asset management function. She says a facility can take those par levels, or the amount of materials needed to ensure a ready supply of a needed resource, and analyze the data to find which floors might be under or over levels. If one floor has an excess amount of a specific type of equipment 80 percent of the time, for example, that equipment could be redistributed to a floor that is low.

Miller says there are even hospitals that have compared their equipment availability and utilization to their census—another way to manage what they buy.

“You know not only that it’s in a room, but that it’s running and we can compare that as a utilization metric and we have one hospital that has taken that and run algorithms to compare it to census and said our census could grow 20 percent and we still have enough capacity in equipment to manage it,” she says.


Fran Dirksmeier, general manager of asset management for GE Global Services, which acquired the Agility RTLS health care solution in 2008, calls it “asset process compliance,” driven in real-time.

“What that means is delivering the right asset at the right time and properly taking care of assets upon discharge of the patient to get the asset cleaned and positioned for use,” he says.

October 2012 Magazine

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