The Challenge: 4,500 Assets Across 6 Buildings
A major hospital network in Riyadh with 1,200 beds and six interconnected buildings was losing significant operational capacity to a single problem: staff couldn't find equipment when they needed it.
The hospital had 4,500 tracked assets — infusion pumps, wheelchairs, ECG machines, portable ultrasound units, patient monitors, and specialty surgical equipment. Manual tracking via clipboards and spreadsheets meant that locating a specific item could take 20–45 minutes of staff time.
📊 The hospital's internal analysis estimated that nursing staff spent an average of 45 minutes per shift searching for equipment. Across a 1,200-bed facility with hundreds of nursing staff, this represented thousands of lost clinical hours per month.
The Solution: RFID + RTLS Hybrid Deployment
SomasRO designed a hybrid solution combining UHF RFID for bulk asset identification and a lightweight RTLS (Real-Time Location System) for high-value equipment requiring room-level location accuracy.
The deployment covered: 6 buildings, 340 rooms, 12 elevator banks, and all major circulation routes. 4,500 assets were tagged with a combination of metal-mount tags (for medical devices with metallic housings) and standard wet inlays (for equipment carts and non-metallic assets).
Implementation Timeline
- Weeks 1–3: Site assessment, infrastructure planning, and reader placement design across all buildings.
- Weeks 4–6: RFID infrastructure installation, network cabling, and reader commissioning.
- Weeks 7–8: Asset tagging — all 4,500 assets tagged and enrolled in the system.
- Week 9: Staff training and go-live. SomasRO engineers on-site for the first week.
- Weeks 10–12: Optimisation, fine-tuning of read zones, and handover to hospital IT team.
Results After 6 Months
Equipment search time dropped by 50% — from an average of 22 minutes to 11 minutes — within the first 90 days. More significantly, the availability of real-time location data enabled the hospital to reduce its "buffer stock" of duplicate equipment purchased specifically because items were being lost.
Asset utilisation improved by 25%, allowing the hospital to defer a planned capital expenditure of SAR 2.3M on additional infusion pumps and patient monitors that were, in fact, available in the facility — just not findable.
Key Lessons
- Staff adoption is critical — the first 2 weeks of go-live required intensive on-floor coaching
- On-metal tag selection required extensive pre-deployment testing on medical device housings
- Integration with the hospital's existing CMMS (Computerised Maintenance Management System) added significant value — maintenance history now linked to asset location data
- Wi-Fi interference from medical devices required careful RFID infrastructure planning