AZ Groeninge Boosts Efficiency with Blyott Asset Tracking Solution on AWS

“The Blyott solution on AWS has ushered in a new era of efficiency and intelligence for AZ Groeninge (AZG). The seamless integration of our platform with AWS technology empowers AZG to extract valuable insights from their assets in real-time,” says Kevin Meerschaert, IT Infrastructure and Operations Manager at AZG.

AZ Groeninge (AZG), a teaching hospital in Belgium, stands at the forefront of innovation with 1,200 beds, 7,000 rooms, and over 4,000 staff members. Being the first hospital in the Benelux region to establish a private 5G network on campus, AZG is always seeking innovative ways to enhance healthcare services.

In 2019, AZG aimed to improve operating room staff productivity and launched an asset tracking pilot program with Blyott. Our fully cloud-based solution, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), was designed to go beyond mere tracking capabilities. AZG needed a comprehensive solution that would offer robust reporting, proactive alerts, and seamless integration with their existing asset management system from Planon.

Today, AZG leverages Blyott's location-based tracking and monitoring across its facilities. Of its 9,597 portable medical equipment assets, 81 percent are fitted with our 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 includes our BLE hardware tags, Remote Insights Platform, and Mobile Client built on AWS—AZG can track, trace, and derive operational insights from its extensive equipment inventory. This has resulted in better operational planning and equipment repair workflows.

Addressing Critical Operational Challenges

Before implementing Blyott’s solution, AZG faced significant operational challenges. Operating room staff often struggled to locate portable medical equipment like wheelchairs, bladder scanners, mobile monitors, and infusion stands. Locating a single piece of equipment could take up to 8 minutes, with clinical staff often searching twice daily across 23 operating rooms. At full capacity, this meant up to 91 clinical staff days a year were spent searching for equipment.

Beyond operating rooms, misplaced equipment led to perceived shortages and inadvertent over-purchasing. Misplaced wheelchairs alone were estimated to cost the hospital between €35,000 and €65,000 annually in unnecessary purchases. Additionally, potential patient safety risks arose with the loss of up to 2 transport tubes used to store biological samples. AZG conducted regular maintenance and repairs on 3,500 to 4,250 equipment items yearly. However, it typically took 20 days for nurses to be alerted for collection post-repair, resulting in an estimated 80,000 days of unnecessary equipment downtime each year.

Delivering Transformative Outcomes

With a vision to improve efficiency and reduce waste and costs, AZG launched a Track and Trace pilot using Blyott’s asset tracking solution on 330 operating room equipment items. Blyott’s Remote Insights Platform—built on AWS’s scalable and serverless architecture—enables AZG to run analytics and gain 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 search time. 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 expanded to the entire AZG campus.

Embracing a Circular Economy and New Era of Efficiency

AZG is now using location-based insights to optimize inventory through reuse and repair, minimizing the need for constant replacements. This has reduced the purchase of new wheelchairs from an average of 10 per year between 2018 and 2020 to just 1 per year between 2021 and 2022—equating to €35,000 in annual cost savings. Additionally, there has been zero transport tube loss for four consecutive years, enhancing patient safety and reducing the need for duplicate samples.

Using Blyott’s asset tracking and notification functionality, AZG has streamlined the repaired equipment collection process, shortening the time from 20 days to just 3 to 4 days, saving up to 64,000 days in equipment downtime annually. Moreover, AZG can now proactively manage maintenance cycles, extending the average service life of assets from 7 to 8 years, aligning with circular economy principles of maximizing resource use and minimizing waste.

“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,” says Kevin Meerschaert, IT Infrastructure and Operations Manager at AZG.

Powering Asset Tracking Innovation: Why Blyott Chose AWS

Our decision to build healthcare asset tracking solutions on AWS was driven by a strategic evaluation of how AWS offerings align with our goals. Integrating Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)—a managed Kubernetes service—into our infrastructure allows us to orchestrate containerized applications. This gives our asset tracking solution the reliability and adaptability needed to meet the healthcare sector’s demand for analytics and insights.

Using AWS Graviton Processors—a family of processors designed to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads running in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—we have achieved significant cost reductions. Enhanced performance of workloads running on AWS Graviton has allowed us to run our Bluetooth Internet of Things (IoT) solution more efficiently, estimating a decrease in workload carbon intensity of 47 percent. This supports our goal of reducing power consumption and achieving sustainability.

Other AWS technologies, including Amazon Athena serverless interactive analytics service and Amazon ElastiCache fully managed, in-memory caching service, provide us with the scalable computing and storage capacity essential for our operations. With the flexibility and reliability of our infrastructure on AWS, Blyott can continue to innovate and help hospitals like AZG transform healthcare.

‍

This article has an original version available on this link.

‍