Where the heck is my stuff?
Indoor tracking can make a huge difference to any healthcare facility. Hospitals, aged care homes, even clinics — everyone gains from knowing where needed things are right now.
The benefits are clear. You'll be able to respond quickly when equipment you need can be found immediately. You’ll reduce frustration and time wasted trying to find things. And you won’t double-up on equipment purchases because you’ll be confident that you’ll find what you need when you need it.
But it’s expensive
Until now it’s been too expensive and complex to get started. But Spotto has harnessed a number of recent advances that have brought tracking into the budget of any organisation.
The first is the price of tracking hardware — both the tags you put on your equipment and the readers that listen for them. These have dramatically reduced recently. But that’s just part of the puzzle. We’ve used many of the clever new services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a smart system that enables us to cost-effectively deal with the complexities of signals from lots of devices and make sense of it all.
Most importantly though, we’ve worked out how to make installing and running real-time indoor tracking so simple that anyone can set it up. We stepped away from the complexity of floor plans and listened to how hospital staff told each other where things were. We proved it during the COVID-19 lockdown when our hospital pilot client installed their tracking system themselves (covering the whole hospital in a couple of days) because we weren’t allowed in.
So, no big project costs! No cabling costs. And no installer costs. Which are major reasons why the budgets of so many of these products mount up.
5c per day? Really?
Let’s get down to brass tacks. With Spotto each reader covers a named ‘zone.’ The zones can be as big as 40 meters across but much denser with more readers. In a hospital a zone might be a part of a ward, an operating theatre or an equipment store.
Say you want to monitor 500 pieces of equipment around 30 zones in a hospital. This was a real use case for us last year. You’d need the following:
- 500 x $20 tags for the equipment you want to track (that’s a one-off cost)
- 30 x $25/month for the readers and the Spotto software that provides the tracking service and allows unlimited users to search for equipment
So that’s $10,000 (one-off charge) for the tags and $750/month ongoing for monitoring the 30 zones. That’s it! Once you’ve bought the tags it will cost 5c/day to track each piece of equipment (or a person) in this scenario.
When you start to add up the costs of not being able to find things quickly in terms of patient outcomes, wasted staff time and lost equipment, you’ll see how effectively Spotto can help you to do more with what you’ve got.
Book a free, no-obligation express chat at a time that suits you to discuss how Spotto could be a great fit for your team.