To understand the problems acute care hospitals face, and the return on investment (ROI) they might reasonably expect from solutions that Awarepoint provides, Awarepoint has developed an prestigious healthcare executive team, including Dr. Dennis O’Leary, former President of The Joint Commission and Vice Admiral Harold M. Koenig, MD, whose vast experience includes having served as Surgeon General of the Navy.

Working with these and other experts, Awarepoint uncovered some startling statistics that exemplify the need for better data and safer, more efficient hospital operations, including:

  • Approximately 15% of equipment is missing or misplaced at any given time.
  • Organizations spend approximately 5% to 15% of their equipment budgets on rentals just to replace misplaced equipment.
  • Operating rooms operate at less than 68% capacity partly due to poor equipment workflow.
  • Employee time spent looking for lost equipment has been estimated up to 30 minutes per shift per employee.
  • Biomedical Engineering personnel spend up to 40% of their time looking for equipment, and cannot find equipment up to 20% of the time.
  • Hospitals accrue over $213,000 annually in unnecessary rental costs due to misplaced and lost rental equipment.
  • Between 44,000 and 98,000 people die in U.S. hospitals each year as the result of lapses in patient safety.
  • Hospitals face on-going equipment maintenance, testing, inspection, and compliance challenges that can be costly, even deadly, if not managed properly.

These experts further challenged us to think about these scenarios likely preventing the most efficient, compliant, and safe care at your facility:

  • Are you getting patients out of ED as soon as you can and to the appropriate level of care? If you can’t transfer the patient out of ED because a special piece of equipment isn’t available for him in ICU, what happens when the next ambulance arrives and your ED is full?
  • If you can’t transfer patients from the ICU to a medical/surgical floor because the right equipment or right bed for lower level care is not readily available, what does this cost your hospital?
  • Are you prolonging patient suffering or delaying treatment because something ordered for a patient isn’t readily available? This delay in treatment not only prolongs the patient’s disease process; it costs you in time and resources by keeping patients in an inappropriate level of care longer.
  • When there’s a negative patient outcome, how often is that associated with equipment or appropriate skilled staff resources not being available?

Return on Investment (ROI)

Our customers consistently and often dramatically improve their operating performance: they treat more patients more quickly without increasing lead times, staffing levels, or capital expenditures (e.g., expanding facilities or purchasing additional equipment). Most importantly, Awarepoint Real-time Awareness Solutions achieve all of these objectives without compromising safety, compassion, or quality of care.
Some specific examples of our Return on Investment include:
Enterprise-wide Impact
  • Enabled facility to save $2 million by “right sizing” mobile medical equipment (MME) capital expenditures, driven by automated asset management utilization gains
  • Lost pumps went from 14.2% to 0%
  • Eliminated rentals – cost savings of $147,776
  • 64% improvement over baseline
  • 230 Alaris PCU’s valued at $674,000 redeployed as a result of increased utilization
  • Lost/Stolen movable medical equipment (MME) dropped from an annual rate of
    13.8% to 0%
  • Service so well received – added 22% more MME units to system (e.g. gurneys, crash carts, breast pumps, wound vacs., and specialty beds)
  • Biomed technicians never need to search for equipment PM’s
  • Hand hygiene pilot has contributed to an over 50% increase in compliance
  • Projected over $1 million capital savings from improved management and utilization of assets
  • Real-time monitoring of vaccine temperatures projected to save cost of labor-intensive CDC guidelines
  • Improved patient and staff safety with automatic encounter summary for interaction with contamination/infectious conditions
  • Reduced risk of patient-to asset-to patient cross contamination
  • Reduced risk of thermal compromise (and the associated consequences) on temperature-controlled environments
  • Reduced equipment maintenance costs
Emergency Department Impact
  • Generated $14.8 million in annual revenue due to reductions in LWOT & diversions
  • Reduced LOS (length of stay) – the average time patients spend in the ED fell from approx. 9 hours in 2002 to less than 3.5 hours in 2008 despite a 24% increase in census
  • Fewer walkouts – LWOT dropped by as much as 67%
  • Decreased diversion hours percentage by 87% over the last 5 years
  • Reduced payment denials for ED services from 3.4% to 2.1%
  • ED patient satisfaction, as measured by Press Ganey, rose 15%
  • Decreased decision-to-bed interval times for admitted patients 25%
  • “Recaptured” patients worth over $400k in ED and admitted patient revenue on an annualized basis
  • Data has enabled ED redesign accounting for reductions in LWOT from 8% to 3.4%
  • Improved patient satisfaction levels among low acuity patients from the 73rdpercentile to 99th percentile on the Press Ganey scale
  • Reduced admitted patient LOS 36 minutes as census rose 7%
  • Reduced average treated and released patient LOS by 45 minutes
  • Reduced LOS for low acuity patients from more than 2 hours to less than 1 hour
  • Decreased left without treatment rate for low acuity patients from 4.5% to 2.5%
  • Annual ED Boarding Time has fallen from 85k to 45k hours as annual ED census rose from 80k to 112k
  • Increased staff safety with automatic log of all patient interactions
  • Enhanced effective ED capacity to treat 24% more patients, facilitating additional admissions worth $4.5 million in annual hospital revenue
  • Reduced physician dictation usage by 97% resulting in a recurring annual savings of over $500,000
  • Enhanced capability to manage patient surges (treated 312 patients on a single day) in an ED that sees triple the average patient volume of a U.S. emergency department
  • Nurse satisfaction scores improved dramatically
Surgical Services Impact
  • Added an average of 49 cases per month in the Perioperative Department, equivalent to over $24 million in new charges/revenue in one year
  • Decreased OR turnaround time pre/post implementation (2002 vs. 2008) as measured by Surgery Stop to Next Surgery Start by 23%
  • Reduction in inter-department phone calls by 82%; saved 4.5 hours a day or > 1125 hours per year
  • Improvement in timely administration of antibiotics by 53%
  • Staff satisfaction average baseline score was 2.65 before and 4.26 after (5-point scale) awareORTracker
  • Data is available to support further operational improvements via measurement of milestones throughout a patient visit
  • Reduced time to source moveable medical equipment
  • 100% location and status of patients and assets
  • Anticipation of staffing needs for post-op by patient acuity – 100%
  • Immediate notification of family post surgery – 100%
  • One charge nurse can manage 53 pre-op beds
  • Created a noticeably quieter OR (healing environment)
  • Average case volume +26 cases per month since implementation
  • Substantially improved communication between staff and departments
  • Contracted to implement awareORTracker in the surgical services departments in additional network locations
  • Increased patient satisfaction by improving wait time perceptions and family members being proactively kept informed
  • Improved staff satisfaction related to knowledge of patient location, status, diagnostic results availability – all without staff having to manually enter information
Moreover, our systems automatically make effective workflow decisions and disseminate valuable, action-oriented information with very little data entry or other human intervention. As a result, personnel can spend time focusing on their real jobs: caring for patients – or supporting those who do.