Piedmont Healthcare RTLS Case Study
Piedmont Healthcare saves $2 million with system-wide asset tracking and management.
About Piedmont Healthcare
Piedmont Healthcare is the largest healthcare provider in Georgia and one of the region’s fastest-growing systems.
With that growth came challenges. Nurses and other staff often struggled to locate mobile medical equipment and other assets needed for patient care. The health system also lacked a reliable way to measure equipment utilization across facilities or determine future purchasing needs. These gaps led to inefficient workflows, reduced productivity and higher equipment costs.
Building on Proven Success
Piedmont had already experienced success using real-time location solutions at its flagship hospital, Piedmont Atlanta, where it saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by tracking equipment and right-sizing its fleet. The next step was to scale those results across the entire health system.
What Piedmont needed was an enterprise-wide solution to standardize asset management on a single platform and drive system-wide efficiencies.
HID Healthcare RTLS Solution
Piedmont collaborated with HID Healthcare RTLS to expand its advanced real-time location platform across all 11 hospitals and other facilities in the network. The goal: to make clean, operational mobile medical equipment—such as beds, pumps and defibrillators—available when and where caregivers needed them.
Installing HID’s RTLS in multiple hospitals created opportunities to rethink equipment management at scale. Working together, Piedmont and HID launched a centralized distribution center, serving as an in-house rental operation for the health system. With visibility from the HID InVIEW™ software, staff could easily identify when one location had too much or too little of a certain piece of equipment and reallocate accordingly. This eliminated unnecessary rental fees and reduced capital spending.
Beyond Asset Management
In addition to equipment tracking, Piedmont expanded use of HID’s RTLS to address other operational challenges. Temperature monitoring, for example, was automated to protect food, blood, medications and other valuable items stored in refrigerators and freezers. The system eliminated manual logging and provided instant alerts in the event of temperature excursions.
The RTLS platform also enhanced infection control. If equipment was used on a patient and then moved to another room without proper cleaning, the system flagged the event for staff. In the case of healthcare-associated infections, assets could be quickly located and taken out of circulation until sanitized.
How It Works: Enterprise-Wide Asset Management
- HID installs network devices in hospital ceilings and designs the system end to end.
- Each asset is outfitted with a small tag containing a unique ID code.
- Tags communicate with the network devices, transmitting real-time location information to a central server.
- Data is displayed in HID’s InVIEW™ mapping and analytics software. Staff can search for specific devices, view their locations and run detailed utilization reports.
- With an in-house equipment rental service, assets can be redistributed across hospitals to where they are needed most.
The Results
By standardizing on HID Healthcare RTLS, Piedmont realized substantial financial and operational gains across its network.
- $2 million saved across the health system
- $1 million saved in a single year at Piedmont Atlanta
- $400,000 in capital purchases avoided over two years
- 90% increase in productivity
- $510,000 saved annually on equipment costs
- 20%+ improvement in equipment utilization
- Recognized with the 2019 Technology Association of Georgia Award for leadership in bringing innovative technology to market
“Standardizing will also help us transfer best practices and lessons-learned from one location to others more easily and tap into the creativity and effectiveness of our entire team.”
— Jeff Allen, Senior Director of Biomedical Engineering, Piedmont Healthcare
