Consider These KPIs For Your Pneumatic Tube System

KPIs Are Essential

Without measurement, scientific hypotheses can’t be confirmed. The same is true in business. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential to organizations as a way to determine the efficacy of various systems, processes, and strategies. That said, KPIs play a major role in hospital operations to enable management to gauge current methodologies and identify areas of opportunity – especially as they relate to patient care.

And while KPIs are valuable in gauging the performance of personnel, they’re essential for monitoring the systems they depend upon. The process of transporting, delivering, and managing materials require a high level of efficiency and – to get KPI data – tracking. Some hospitals continue to use manual methods to handle some of these processes. Others are upgrading their pneumatic tube systems to provide this data.

How To Measure Your Pneumatic Tube System

There are implementation guidelines for hospital logistics which emphasize enhancing the rational and secure use of resources but they do not include specific indicators to assess the quality of their tube system. Considering the key role the pneumatic tube system plays in operations, many hospitals have some form of measurement, but not all systems and applications are the same. Luckily modern pneumatic tube systems can provide specific indicators including the following:

• Average Delivery Time
• Number of Deliveries per Hour
• Delivery Accuracy Rate
• System Downtime
• Maintenance Frequency
• Incident Reports
  
  

When combined, these KPIs provide valuable information on the system’s use, its health, and its efficacy. To see how pneumatic tube system downtime can impact the bottom line, many use the TransLogic manual transport calculator, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Some systems stand to benefit drastically from improving average delivery time, fixing system errors, and predicting maintenance. For that, a system design expert can help determine how that efficiency will translate to your bottom line.

How Effectively Are You Managing Your Hospital Logistics?

Running an efficient hospital logistics system requires a series of processes that must work together to create a seamless workflow that optimizes the use of valuable employees while delivering quality care to patients.

Technologies now enable today’s hospitals to track performance of everything from staffing to inventory, to patient outcomes. Creating carefully constructed, data-driven KPIs in each area of operations will provide valuable insights to support more informed decisions by administrators and hospital staff.