Why You Need Your CMMS System to be RTLS-Enabled
Integrating Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) with a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) in healthcare facilities significantly enhances asset tracking by providing precise, real-time equipment location and status, thereby reducing labor costs, improving maintenance efficiency, ensuring regulatory compliance, preventing warranty voids, and ultimately boosting patient safety and staff productivity.
A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is essential in healthcare facilities. It enables hospitals to monitor assets that require maintenance, ensuring they remain safe for use. The system also allows staff to create work orders, print lists of assets due for preventive maintenance, and understand the equipment lifecycle.
While a CMMS system improves management of the hospital fleet, many systems lack critical data: the exact location and status of equipment. For example, a CMMS might display the department where a piece of equipment is allocated, but this does not provide the detail needed to effectively find and recover equipment at any given moment. Without this information, staff may spend hours or even days searching for equipment, increasing labor costs and introducing risks to regulatory compliance and patient safety.
Given that hospital assets move frequently, it is surprising that many CMMS systems do not integrate with Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS). CMMS systems are designed to boost efficiency and ensure strong management and compliance, but their effectiveness is limited if equipment cannot be easily located.
Many hospitals, after facing challenges with locating equipment and rising labor costs, have chosen to enhance their CMMS systems by integrating automatically collected asset location and status information. By combining RTLS data with their CMMS, hospitals save thousands of labor hours, as staff can immediately locate any item due for preventive maintenance. This integration improves staff productivity and key performance indicators such as request-to-dispatch time. It also helps avoid missed maintenance, which could result in costly voided manufacturer warranties.
More importantly, an RTLS-enabled CMMS provides real-time access to location information, improving patient safety by allowing staff to quickly find and remove broken or recalled equipment. Additionally, knowing whether equipment is currently in use enables clinical engineers to coordinate with care providers for replacements without disrupting patient care.
By enabling location tracking in your CMMS system, your organization can achieve a strong financial return on investment while providing a safer environment for patients.
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Why You Need Your CMMS System To Be RTLS Enabled
Integrating Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) with Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) in healthcare facilities significantly enhances asset tracking by providing precise, real-time equipment locations, thereby reducing labor costs, preventing missed maintenance, ensuring regulatory compliance, and ultimately improving patient safety.
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