Cohealo Introduces SaaS Solution for Real-Time Tracking of Equipment Utilization

On average, a health system’s medical equipment will sit idle for 58 percent of its lifespan, tying up finite capital planning budgets in redundant purchases that are estimated to be as high as 25 percent of a single hospital’s inventory. To address this, Cohealo, a platform for sharing equipment, has launched Cohealo Track, a SaaS-based solution that leverages case information from a hospital system’s electronic health record (EHR) to provide actionable insights into medical equipment utilization. Deployed within a single facility or across a hospital network, Cohealo Track can help to reduce capital expenditures, decrease rental costs, and improve efficiency. Cohealo Track is for the perioperative suite, with plans to expand to both in- and out-patient settings.
 
“Existing solutions to measure and improve equipment utilization, such as RFID chips and leasing services, fall short for addressing the needs of a large health system,” said Michael Kerner, former CEO at Bon Secours Hampton Roads. “Without a solution like Cohealo Track that provides valuable and accurate data on equipment utilization, executives are operating in a vacuum when it comes to making significant purchasing decisions.”
 
Cohealo Track is the foundational analytics engine that powers Cohealo’s equipment sharing technology. By knowing where, when and how often medical equipment is used, Cohealo Track finds opportunities to optimize these assets and drive greater returns on a hospital’s capital investment. Additionally, Cohealo Track enables health systems to:
 

• Identify assets that can be shared between facilities to improve surgeons’ access to equipment and maximize the usage of existing resources
• Pinpoint underutilized equipment and free up working capital by selling redundant equipment
• Find equipment that is being overused to prevent unplanned equipment downtime and lost revenue from equipment-related procedure delays
• Compare equipment utilization between service lines and facilities to benchmark performance and drive increased procedure volume
• Enhance current real-time location system programs by reducing the time required for clinical staff to manually locate and schedule equipment for their cases, all on a single dashboard

 
“We have seen tremendous interest in our platform from organizations seeking to proactively manage their investment into capital equipment. Implementing takes less than a week and doesn’t require replacing any existing infrastructure,” said Brett Reed, CEO and co-founder of Cohealo. “Our solution works seamlessly with all the leading EHR platforms to capture equipment usage data, avoiding the need for time-consuming equipment tagging, and we have scaled effectively to meet the needs of one of the largest multi-state health systems in the country.”
 
Based in Boston, Cohealo finds savings for health systems by increasing the utilization of their medical equipment through proactive data analytics and equipment sharing. With deeper insights into equipment usage, hospitals can pinpoint redundant equipment that is underutilized, areas for rental avoidance, and ways to share equipment between facilities. As the program scales within a health system, the network effect drives increasing levels of savings through redundant capex avoidance and decreased rental expense. Cohealo has been named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies List and CNBC’s Disruptor 50 and is recognized as the first solution of its type to bring the sharing economy to healthcare.