Visibility That Drives Value: How RTLS Optimizes Asset Management for Improved Patient Care, Staff Satisfaction and Financial Outcomes  

3/26/2025

The frustration of losing a set of keys is something that everyone can relate to. Whether it's a frantic search through your bag or retracing your steps around the house, that feeling of frustration is universal. In the healthcare setting, that feeling can be a multiple-times-per-day occurrence for nurses, who often can’t find the equipment they need to deliver patient care. And when equipment is expensive, specialized and vital, the consequences are much more severe.

Losing equipment can create major disruptions. Just as you might waste time looking for your keys, staff can find themselves scrambling to locate essential, and in some cases, lifesaving equipment for patient care. In both scenarios, the frustration is the same—time is lost, and the goal is to find what you need as quickly as possible to minimize disruption. In hospitals where the stakes are much higher, the impact of a missing piece of equipment is detrimental to the following: 

Patient care. Nurses spend an average of 30 minutes per ten hour shift looking for equipment such as IV pumps, wheelchairs, vein finders and more.[i] That’s time that they could be providing care to patients, which correlates directly to improved outcomes. A recent review in Cureus shows that patient-centered care can be an important strategy when trying to improve outcomes. [ii]  When nurses spend time away from the bedside and needed equipment isn’t available, the timeliness and quality of patient care can suffer.

Patient satisfaction. Consider the following scenario: A discharged patient, anxious to go home after a strenuous hospital stay, is waiting to be escorted out of the hospital. However, since there is no available wheelchair, another couple of hours is tacked onto the patient’s stay. And, while the patient might have received great care, satisfaction with the overall experience is likely to suffer. There’s also another patient to think of in this scenario—the one who can’t be admitted in a timely manner because a wheelchair isn’t available to discharge the first patient. Not only does this affect the patient experience, it could also affect the increased revenue that comes with timely discharges and room turnover. With more focus on caregiving through improved asset management, patient satisfaction scores can improve by as much as 15 points.[iii]

Staffing in the age of burnout. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) projects a shortage of 63,720 RNs by 2030 in the United States.[iv] Such numbers are concerning enough, but consider the following as well: In April 2022, Dr. David Auerbach and colleagues published a nursing workforce analysis in Health Affairs, that found that total supply of RNs decreased by more than 100,000 from 2020 to 2021—the largest drop than ever observed over the past four decades. A significant number of nurses who left the workforce were under the age of 35, and most were employed in hospitals.[v]

While the study did not delve into medical equipment management, it seems safe to assume these young nurses envisioned a career filled with rewarding interactions with patients, not one filled with menial tasks including spending 10% of their shift looking for equipment.1 Overall, nurses are exhausted from increased workloads and constantly fretting about not having the equipment to do their job. And this adds stress and anxiety to employees already experiencing high burnout and turnover rates.

An organization’s bottom-line. Whether stolen, misplaced or lost, missing medical equipment costs American hospitals millions annually.[vi] Sometimes, in attempts to ensure patient care does not get disrupted, nurses hide important equipment. In fact, clinical leaders estimate that 30% of their equipment is hidden at any given time.[vii] At the same time, asset fleets are shrinking by 10% every year,6 with equipment that is not able to be found, transferred with patients to other hospitals or simply stolen. The costs add up. Missing equipment impacts the average 300-bed hospital by $7 million annually.1 Here’s the unfortunate breakdown:

• $5,250,000 in non-value added nursing wages, for covering the 10% of nursing shifts spent away from the bedside looking for missing equipment1
• $1,500,000 in write offs for the 10% of equipment that goes missing each year6
• $125,000 in capital expenses from over-purchasing assets to ensure availability
• $100,000 in hidden operational expenses as individual nursing units replace lost assets
• $42,750 in biomedical technician wages for the 208 hours per year they spend simply searching for equipment7
• $3,000 in equipment rental costs to supplement for missing assets

What’s needed to solve this asset management problem? In a word, visibility. For insight into the location of their medical equipment, hospitals can rely on a real-time locating systems (RTLS) that can be used to identify and track the location of objects or people in real time, usually within a building or other contained area.  Beyond just visibility to location of equipment, RTLS technology can also help to visually manage distribution of assets with periodic automatic replenishment (PAR) levels.

Midmark CareFlow™ RTLS provides an enterprise view that not only enables users to easily find equipment and proactively manage equipment distribution with PAR levels but also track asset movements and view preventive maintenance dates. As a result, it is possible to know which hospital units are running low on key assets and which are overstocked, keep tabs on mobile asset inventory and save on unnecessary equipment expenditures.

The results of using RTLS can be substantial. After implementing CareFlow Asset Tracking and PAR Management, a Michigan hospital shared their successes in saving valuable staff time and significantly reducing costs. Their biomedical team performed a software upgrade on pumps within three days which would have taken several weeks to complete before implementing RTLS. Additionally, utilization of assets was improved by 133% allowing them to decrease pump acquisition from 1,000 to 600, saving more than $1 million.

The visibility and proactive asset management provided as a result of using RTLS can drive value by optimizing staff time and equipment location. The results? Improved patient care, increased staff satisfaction and significant cost reductions for the organization.