Optimize key operations

BACKGROUND

Our client wanted to improve efficiency of hospital operations from 70% to 100% efficiency

America’s #1 children’s hospital is home to the largest pediatric research facility in the country.

World-renowned as a center for medical expertise, the hospital (name withheld for confidentiality reasons) serves more than 29,000 patients on an annual basis and is nationally ranked in more than 10 pediatric specialties. Equipment order fulfillment and asset inventory management are vital operational processes that ensure supplies, equipment, and resources get where they are needed across the hospital’s 1 million square foot campus—without delaying life-saving medical interventions—or wasting essential organizational resources.

HealthOps is the healthcare operations management vendor responsible for handling the operational logistics, equipment, sharps, and safety standards needed to deliver the best possible outcomes for the hospital's patients. After completing robust equipment audits, the firm realized that error-prone and cumbersome manual processes were reducing operational efficiencies and negatively impacting patient outcomes.

The hospital’s existing equipment order fulfillment and asset inventory management system were spread across a variety of different technology platforms and paperwork-driven manual inventory recording systems. Our client needed to digitize, optimize, streamline, and automate these key operational logistics processes to expedite services, improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance accuracy.

CHALLENGE

To create a scalable order fulfillment and asset management process

Before contracting Asahi Technologies, the hospital's equipment order fulfillment and asset inventory management process required copious manual paperwork and time-consuming data entry. Manually transferring daily inventory figures into the hospital’s computer systems often resulted in errors and inaccuracies reducing the reliability and validity of data.

Meanwhile, the equipment vendor, HealthOps, was unable to optimize vital operational logistics processes using the existing error-prone legacy system. After completing comprehensive audits, it became clear that inaccuracies were leading to inefficiencies of scale that were costing the hospital time, money, and supplies.

Our client needed to develop a new system that would digitize, automate, and streamline the entire end-to-end equipment order fulfillment and asset inventory management processes.

To optimize key operational logistics processes at the hospital, HealthOps enlisted Asahi Technologies to develop a solution with the following features:

• A Single Unified Equipment Order Fulfillment and Asset Inventory Management Process – The new solution needed to streamline various disparate data resources and manual processes to create a single digital source of truth ensuring accuracy, reliability, and adherence to the hospital’s high quality, safety, and efficiency standards.
• Provide Role-Based Access and Control of the System – The system needed to provide segmented and tiered access for 5 unique user persona types: administrators, supervisors, leads, tech, and requestor.
• Automate, Streamline, and Optimize Core Business Processes – The goal of this robust digital transformation initiative was to implement automation to optimize the process and save time, money, and mission-critical organizational resources.
• Create a More Agile and Scalable Solution – To fulfill HealthOp’s requirement to develop a modular solution that could be refined and scaled to meet changing needs in the years ahead.

SOLUTION

Customized mobile app with requestor and administrator portals

To fulfill the client’s development criteria and support critical business process automation, our team developed an integrated equipment order fulfillment and asset inventory management solution that unified the hospital's internal equipment ordering and fulfillment processes.

We implemented a custom software and hardware solution.

Solution Highlights:

• AWS EC2 Instance for hosting the backend application
• AWS SES for email management
• MYSQL Database to securely store the organizational data used in the applications
• React Native to build iOS and Android mobile applications
• Watermelon Database to provide local data storage capability in the mobile devices running the application
• Spring Boot and JPA Frameworks to form a strong foundation for the application and to ensure future scalability
• React to power the administrator portal
• js to deliver more comprehensive dashboard functionality
• Bluetooth Barcode Scanner hardware for scanning inventory items

Our custom software deployment involved the creation of two web-based applications (administrator and requestor portal) as well as a mobile app. The solution provides real-time visibility into the status of equipment and asset requests, while automating end-to-end fulfillment, and ensuring that inventory totals are updated in real-time. Instead of requiring clinical care teams to complete additional paperwork and time-consuming data entry, the solution vastly improves the speed, accuracy, and reliability of operational logistics while providing more comprehensive data analysis and reporting capabilities.

The dashboards and mobile applications create a single source of truth that ensures accurate accounting of organizational resources. The completed system does not require manual recording of inventory totals and utilizes automation to streamline and digitize what used to be disparate manual processes executed using various software inputs. The result is a completely modular software and hardware-based solution that simplifies, expedites, and enhances key operational logistics processes at America’s #1 children’s hospital.

TESTIMONIAL

Best outcomes

IMPACT

America’s #1 Children’s Hospital is a trail-blazer in asset inventory management

The completed integrated equipment order fulfillment and asset inventory management solution allowed the hospital to take a critical step forward toward achieving more robust operational agility through digital transformation. The new system helped to streamline core operational processes, expedite order fulfillment, and inventory management, while providing a user-friendly interface delivering role-based access to empower every stakeholder connected to the end-to-end process.

This deployment and collaboration with Asahi Technologies’ team was very successful, and the client has requested the software to be further enhanced to deliver more robust functionality to support the management of new requests—to transport patients around the hospital's sprawling campus. The overall development architecture and user interface have proven so successful for its task that additional medical facilities across the United States are currently discussing deploying the system.