Intelligent Locations
Purpose-Built Solution for Healthcare Asset Management

Unavailability of patient assistance, life-saving equipment, in their time of need is the last things that hospitals would want to deal with. As such, many healthcare institutions opt to purchase and stock mobile assets at moderately higher volumes than what would be required. However, without a robust method to track those assets and their usage, this budget-hefty procurement strategy is of little value. Here is an alarming stat: the average asset utilization in the healthcare space is just about 40 percent; which implies that efficient use can entirely negate the need for surplus purchase. Besides, without the insights from data pertaining to asset tracking and management, hospitals cannot explore possibilities for efficient usage and acquisition of assets.

With a solution stack built exclusively for the fast-paced healthcare arena, Intelligent Locations offers one of the most cost-efficient real-time location services (RTLS) platform on the market that can help singlehandedly track patients, assets, and their management by healthcare professionals. In an interview with CIOApplications, Bogdan Nedelcu, CEO and Jake Bartnicki, VP of Sales at Intelligent Locations shared firsthand insights on the unique value proposition that their company imparts to the healthcare space as it pertains to enterprise asset management.

What sets Intelligent Locations apart from the rest of the players in the EAM landscape?

For a very long time, RTLS solutions were based on RFID chips. Observing newer technologies like Bluetooth low-energy tags and the availability of immense amount of cloud-based computing power and storage made us believe there is a better way to address the management of assets in hospital environments.

Ours is a solution that is built exclusively for healthcare institutions. Our platform is very flexible in the problems that it solves. There is not a piece of equipment that we cannot track. Once we’ve covered a hospital with an initial hardware installation, we can easily layer on additional services like patient tracking, hand wash hygiene, and indoor way finding to name a few. Our platform is very flexible to adapt to any solution that hospitals may need to seek around location tracking, usage status, and duration. We have had instances where hospitals measure the rate of washroom doors opening and closing to co-relate to housekeeping. Alternatively, temperature sensors powered by a beacon automatically identify a change in temperature outside a normal range in refrigerators and send out notifications to concerned maintenance personnel promptly.

Please throw some more light on hospitals can go up and running with your offering.

Often, the ROI that hospitals gain from installing asset management solutions is negligible owing to the high purchase and installation costs.

One of the biggest differentiators of our platform is its zero cost of installation. All that we’d require from a hospital is its Wi-Fi credentials to program our gateways to the individual hospital network, after which the hospital is ready to leverage a full-fledged, non-obtrusive location-based tracking solution. Intelligent Locations is an end-to-end solution provider which means Hospitals do not have to worry about buying hardware from one company while they resort to another to have front-end solution developed or to capture end-user analytics.

Could you give us more insights into the analytics capabilities of the platform? What are some of the visibility parameters and controls that users can leverage?

The way forward for the healthcare industry is to use analytics to drive efficiency; with our platform, users can analyze and visualize any parameter that may be related to operational efficiencies. Furthermore, we also have a research center dedicated to analytics and predictive models. We can help hospitals estimate how many pieces of equipments they need or identify bottlenecks in workflows depending on the data we’ve collected in the past so they can cut cost or over-time work.

To exemplify your product’s core capabilities, could you share with us a couple of customer success stories?

We enabled a hospital’s nurses to spend time more effectively with the patients by helping them save up to 30 hours in searching for equipment. From a clinical engineering standpoint, a client was able to reduce the time in equipment servicing by 45 percent which dramatically lowered the maintenance cost. In yet another instance, a hospital, using our platform came to realize that they had only about 55 percent utilization of pumps. Subsequently, they were able to save 34 percent in their capital budgeting for procurement of pumps. On the patient tracking side, a medical institution was able to precisely track their operating-room utilization after which they were able to revamp their surgeon block schedule accordingly. They were also able to make better use of their surgery center which otherwise remained unused most of the time.

What were the factors that spurred the conception of Intelligent Locations?

I have always been interested in new technologies to solve the biggest problems in any industry. After I graduated college I spent 15 years with Motorola developing cellular networks in seven different countries. As I grew through my career I would visualize applying new technology to different industries and see what problems they could solve. Legacy RTLS systems have been unattainable due to the exorbitant cost associated with them. Applying new technology to solve the age old problem of overspending and inefficient processes gave me the spark I needed to create Intelligent Locations for the healthcare industry. We give hospitals a solution that solves their problems at a fraction of the cost. That was the essence of how we started: by addressing an issue that was not scalable by existing technologies at the time.

How has the track record been for Intelligent Locations in the recent past? How do you envision the roadmap of the company?

We continue to grow as a company. We have reached that position of growth where we have to increase our workforce to meet the growing demands for our products. In addition to the customer service center in Chicago, we have set up a development center in Romania. We will also launch an R&D wing in France for developing advanced analytics capabilities that will be integrated into the platform.