Medical equipment by nature is moved around from one work area to another, especially mobile equipment. Just when the mobile lithotripter is needed in ER, no one seems to know exactly where it was last used or where it is!

Hospital Del Marco was experiencing this exact problem. Mobile equipment was being moved throughout their 97 patient rooms, ICU, ER, and examination rooms. Stationary equipment was getting re-assigned to other rooms, but there was no audit trail or index of where the equipment was located.

Most of this equipment also required scheduled maintenance. It is critical that these very expensive devices are maintained in order for them to operate at peak performance levels.

The hospital put OPUS Asset Tracker in place. The first phase began with indexing all equipment into the OPUS Asset Tracker database. Barcodes and RFID tags were placed on each piece of equipment and hospital rooms were setup a OPUS Locations.

Equipment can now easily be assigned room locations and OPUS will record a chain of custody of each time the equipment moves. To easily record the equipment location, hospital personnel on each floor will perform a quick inventory using a portable RFID reader.

Asset Managers can now run location reports that specify each location and the equipment that currently resides there. These reports also contain the next planned maintenance date and other information about the equipment. Other reports include equipment eligible for retirement, chain of custody history and other report types. Reports can be user definable, so many were customized by their own staff.