“With Blyott’s solution on AWS, we’ve unlocked a new era of efficiency and intelligence. The seamless integration of Blyott’s platform with AWS technology empowers us to extract valuable insights from our assets in real-time.”
Kevin Meerschaert, IT Infrastructure and Operations Manager, AZG
AZ Groeninge (AZG) is a teaching hospital in Belgium, with 1,200 beds, 7,000 rooms, and more than 4,000 staff members. It was the first hospital in the Benelux region to establish a private 5G network on campus, and is always looking for innovative ways to improve delivery of healthcare services.
In 2019, with a view to improving operating room staff productivity, AZG launched an asset tracking pilot program with Blyott, whose fully cloud-based solution is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The hospital’s aim was to go beyond mere tracking capabilities. It wanted a comprehensive solution that would provide robust reporting, proactive alerts, and seamless integration with its existing asset management system from Planon.
Today, the hospital uses Blyott location-based tracking and monitoring across its facilities. Of its 9,597 portable medical equipment assets, 81 percent are fitted with Blyott’s Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags. These tags interact with signal locators within AZG’s Wi-Fi infrastructure across the hospital’s five buildings. Using Blyott’s asset tracking solution—which consists of its BLE hardware tags, Remote Insights Platform, and Mobile Client built on Amazon Web Services (AWS)—AZG can track, trace, and derive operational insights from its extensive equipment inventory. The result is better operational planning and equipment repair workflows.
Addressing Critical Operational Challenges
Prior to implementing Blyott’s solution, AZG faced several operational challenges. Operating room staff frequently struggled to locate portable medical equipment—such as wheelchairs, bladder scanners, mobile monitors, and infusion stands—in a timely manner. Locating a single piece of equipment could take up to 8 minutes, with clinical staff often searching for equipment twice a day across 23 operating rooms. At full capacity, this meant that up to 91 clinical staff days a year were spent searching for equipment.
Beyond the operating rooms, misplaced equipment led to perceived shortages and inadvertent over-purchasing. For instance, misplaced wheelchairs alone were estimated to cost the hospital between €35,000 and €65,000 a year in unnecessary purchases. The situation was also posing potential risks to patient safety, with up to 2 transport tubes—which are used to store biological samples—being lost. In addition, AZG would provide regular maintenance and repair works on between 3,500 and 4,250 equipment items a year. However, once an item was repaired, it typically took 20 days for nurses to be alerted for collection, resulting in an estimated 80,000 days of unnecessary equipment downtime each year.
Testing Asset Tracking to Deliver Transformative Outcomes
With a vision to improve efficiency and reduce waste and costs, AZG launched its Track and Trace pilot using Blyott’s asset tracking solution on 330 operating room equipment items. Blyott’s Remote Insights Platform—built on AWS scalable and serverless architecture—helps AZG run analytics and get insights on asset location, utilization patterns, and optimization of repair workflows. Nurses at AZG use Blyott’s Mobile Client application, also built on AWS, to locate operating room equipment in just 1 to 2 minutes, an 88 percent reduction in time spent searching. Building on this success, Blyott’s solution was scaled to cover high-value portable medical equipment across all AZG hospital wards in 2020. And, by 2021, it was expanded to the entire AZG campus.
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