AZ Maria Middelares Saves Valuable Time with Asset Location Tracking
He who seeks finds. That’s how the saying goes. But all while searching, hospital teams risk losing valuable time and money. That’s when a solid asset location-tracking solution is essential. “Bloytt has proven to be the ideal technology partner in advising and supporting us with asset tracking,” says IT & Facilities Director at AZMM, Peter Dierickx.
AZ Maria Middelares (AZMM) is a leading acute care hospital located in Ghent, Belgium. With over 600 beds and 24 state-of-the-art operating rooms, the hospital delivers high-quality care across a broad range of specialties. Each year, more than 200 doctors and nearly 1,900 staff members handle around 65,000 admissions, accounting for 190,000 hospitalization days.
Simple location-based tracking wanted
“At AZMM a lot of assets are used, both medical and non-medical devices,” Dierickx starts. Managing and tracking all those assets is a big challenge, but it’s necessary.
In such cases, location-based asset tracking is crucial—staff members need to know where everything is located. Especially when treating patients is a primary concern, real-time tracking of equipment and machines becomes a necessity, not just a convenience. `
Talking to dozens of hospitals, Blyott acknowledges indoor asset tracking has been around for a while. It’s something medical facilities need but typically is not implemented due to high costs and complexity.
“We’ve been looking for a simple and reliable tracking solution for a couple of years,” Dierickx says. Upon searching for such a solution, the hospital came across Blyott, specializing in IoT (Internet of Things) solutions for location-tracking and monitoring in healthcare environments.
Affordable and quick RTLS alterntive
Classic solutions for real-time location services (RTLS) work with Wi-Fi and are unaffordable for hospitals with thousands of tools and devices to monitor. In addition, the pricing of tracking sensors is high, and the battery lifespan is short.
Blyott offers an alternative, using sensors that work with Wi-Fi access points. Blyott sensors are much cheaper, and the batteries last much longer. As a result, Blyott’s approach is up to 10 times more affordable than a traditional RTLS solution, and what’s more, a BLE solution is also quicker to implement.
“With its existing infrastructure and a decent inventory of its rooms and locations, a hospital can implement a good RTLS solution in 2-6 weeks”, Dierickx says.
Saving time for patient care and asset tracking
When Blyott started working with AZMM to implement an indoor location-tracking solution, the hospital replaced all its Wi-Fi access points with new ones with built-in Bluetooth*.
Using BLE technology, Blyott has developed a cloud solution that picks up BLE signals from Blyott sensors attached to hospital assets. At the same time, Wi-Fi access points also pick up these signals, and in this way, the system calculates the exact position of every asset or device.
Link your Blyott sensors and assets, and you’re ready to start
Jana Bovyn, Project Engineer at AZ Maria Middelares, explains how they easily got started using Blyott’s platform.
“Using the Blyott mobile app, we scan the asset and the sensor to link the two together. This is the very first step. From now on, the system knows that the asset and sensor belong together.”
Jana continues, “When colleagues are looking for a medical device, for instance, a bladder scanner, they can simply type the device name in the Blyott interface on any hospital computer, and the platform will return with a quick overview of where all bladder scanners are located in the hospital.”
*The Blyott solution is compatible with Wi-Fi APs enabled with Bluetooth® technology from various vendors. Bluetooth® is a registered trademark of Bluetooth SIG, Inc.