Smart Carts: Improving Healthcare with IoT Access and Better IT

In hospitals worldwide, mobile carts give healthcare providers instant access to patient charts and a wealth of data. Each cart is typically organized around a laptop or tablet, offering a portal into traditional hospital systems—and a centralized view into connected IoT devices that are “revolutionizing the way healthcare professionals work and deliver care.”  

These carts are designed for multiple users so that those on the healthcare team with the right credentials can log in to view the latest secure patient data. 

These “smart cart” mobile workstations are one of the primary ways for clinicians, such as nurses, PAs, and doctors, to gain a real-time view of data from IoT devices. IoT for the healthcare market is expected to be more than quadrupled in size over the next eight years. 

Given that laptops and tablets are at the heart of these digital carts, minimizing downtime and improving usability through proactive IT is imperative.

After all, when it’s 3 a.m. and an ICU needs to verify a life-saving medication while monitoring vital signs for half a dozen other patients, a laptop on a smart cart needs to work perfectly and at the right time. There is no room for error. 

Mobile Carts

Hospitals deploy smart carts because they help them achieve patient care and satisfaction goals while improving efficiency and reducing costs. 

Connected carts facilitate easier collaboration across teams and departments, allowing quick and efficient collaboration between nurses,  physicians, residents, pharmacists, technicians, and other staff. 

With their readily available information, mobile carts let clinicians know if a patient already has received a dose of their medication, is waiting on specific test results, or even potential risks if two providers prescribe contraindicated medications. 

Centralized documentation and IoT data available through mobile carts improve bedside decision-making and help lower the number of preventable medical errors. In general, medical errors lead to more than 200,000 patient deaths each year and cost upwards of $20 billion.

Depending on the technology, mobile carts also can provide a better user experience for clinicians—a crucial pain point for any hospital trying to recruit and retain providers given the national nursing shortage. Nearly half of workers at large in the U.S. say they’re “likely to leave their current job if they're unhappy or frustrated with the technology they use at work.”

Hospitals that improve their digital employee experience (DEX) may have an edge in keeping and growing their workforce. (Nobody wants to work at a hospital where the laptops crash a dozen times each day.)

Of course, the advantages of smart carts also translate to tangible benefits for patients and caregivers. Patients gain trust when they know a provider is monitoring their condition and medical needs in real-time through IoT devices connected to the mobile cart. 

These carts often allow for faster response times to patient needs and give patients more access (through their medical providers) to their electronic health records and personalized IoT device data.

Proactive IT Management

The benefits of these workstations on wheels are clear—so how do IT departments ensure that smart carts keep delivering value?

• Endpoint monitoring: if you can’t see what’s happening with your IT, you may not know when a laptop on the mobile cart is slowing down or about to crash. Endpoint monitoring solutions work across devices and applications, so you know the status of every device throughout your IT ecosystem.
• Predictive AI: Artificial intelligence that’s built for IT can integrate with endpoint monitoring, leveraging vast datasets and anomaly detection “to predict—and prevent—costly downtime.” Leading systems also offer automated, real-time issue detection and resolution.
• Healthcare personas: A nurse caring for heart attack patients will likely have different needs than a respiratory specialist delivering oxygen therapy. Creating personas of your users—including how they interact with their laptops and what information they need from IoT devices—will help you provide them with the most appropriate (and cost-effective) technology for their needs.
• Eliminating the silent sufferer: In busy medical settings, a doctor or nurse is not going to take the time to call IT to submit a ticket when a cart isn’t working. They’ll simply push it to the side and grab the next cart in line until they find one that’s working. By gaining visibility into which carts are down, you can prevent the long line of unused carts in the hallway of the hospital and fix the downed equipment proactively. 

Avoiding downtime is one of the top priorities in any hospital setting. Proactive IT is a small investment in improving the reliability of mobile carts—and accessing invaluable information from connected IoT devices intended to improve patient care and satisfaction.