Healthcare is a fragile ecosystem, the recent pandemic & struggle with healthcare infrastructure has proved this beyond doubt. Any short supply of life-supporting equipment directly impacts mortality. Hospitals and healthcare institutes want to constantly improve infrastructural facilities, thus resort to leasing equipment to save time and keep their capex in check.
About Client
Our client, a Medical Equipment provider of MME, bedframes, support surfaces, mobility technology, and more, is a trusted partner of hospitals and alternate-site healthcare providers in the United States. The company operates from 30+ locations in US. Over 20+ years into medical equipment rental business, they have pioneered host of services which include:
- Rental medical equipment: General Medical, Infusion, Monitors, Infant care, Respiratory
- Specialty beds
- Medical equipment supplies
- Medical equipment repairs.
- Real Time asset management programs
They are supported by an ecosystem of IT & software applications to manage these assets and track them in real-time for quality control and smart inventory management. These systems ensure their medical supply chain remain healthy. The field force, equipped with mobile application, ensured on-time services for equipment delivery and maintenance.
The Challenges and Opportunities
The Medical Equipment provider controls vast network of distributed assets and services, managed by discrete operations and ERP applications. The warehouse, customer management, order sales and rental operations, and employee management applications were all working in silos.
It took hours to compute transactional information for revenue accounting function. The legacy application often resulted in computation delays.
The management also wanted to track 60,000+ medical assets in real time. They were using scanning guns to pick and place the items for logistics but did not have any solution for tracking it in transit. This resulted in lack of real-time visibility of logistics operations and in-ability to track missing assets, thus impacting revenue. A comprehensive mobile based solution could merge the two operations thereby reducing costs, overheads, and touchpoints.
Accounting and asset management go hand in hand and therefore the client wanted to build a unified solution to bring it all under one roof.
Saviant as Technology Partner
The client built a unified cloud enabled application on Azure PaaS platform. This approach supported warehouse, customer, employee, and accounting function for efficient information exchange.
The system, built on Azure PaaS, enabled prescriptive maintenance of equipment at warehouse as well as at customer location. The real-time asset tracking enabled the Delivery Service Representative (DSR) to monitor equipment in transit on map application over mobile device/platform. The employees are now equipped to efficiently monitor assets both in warehouse as well as those on lease.
The client leveraged Saviant’s expertise in Xamarin platform to develop robust cross platform mobile application, which replaced scanning guns with app enabled barcode scanning. The DSR field application now provides live track of assets in transport. The mobile app also enabled real-time asset tracking and route planning for delivering/collection of medical equipment.
Saviant has been the technology and systems integration partner in developing & integrating a solution for medical equipment asset management. The client today enjoys an improved customer satisfaction index while serving more healthcare institutions in the US. It has a good competitive advantage in terms of customer retention and growth. The technology platform is scalable which is aligned with their roadmap to expand services across new regions such as Canada, UK, and other countries.
Medical equipment asset management solution architecture diagram