Written by SmartSense | Patient Safety, Healthcare, Pharmacy
Leading healthcare organizations are expanding sensorability across their assets to improve health outcomes. Sensorability combines IoT technologies with fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks to manage assets and inventories, thereby maximizing on-shelf availability while reducing unnecessary costs.
In the healthcare sector specifically, sensorability refers to the capacity of an integrated network of assets to use sensors that monitor their environmental conditions to ensure the efficacy of vaccines and medications during transport, storage, and administration. The successful integration of disparate sensing capabilities is proven to be effective to ensure product safety, optimize asset maintenance, improve health worker productivity, and increase patient satisfaction.
Generative AI, the fifth stage of automated intelligence analytics, is expanding the horizon for sensorability in the healthcare industry. In this post, we suggest some best practices for expanding sensorability throughout an enterprise to optimize asset and inventory management, prevent loss, and ensure product efficacy — all which result in improved health outcomes.
Using Generative AI to Improve Health Outcomes
Beginning with descriptive and diagnostic analytics providing real-time data and insights, AI has progressed over the years into more powerful predictive and prescriptive analytics delivering better tools for decision-making and task management. In 2025, we are now moving into the fifth stage of generative analytics.
Generative AI combines the real-time datasets and telemetry data sources from IoT and translates them into incredibly accurate predictions and precise instructions resulting in more powerful outputs. The scale of connected sensor networks combined with behavioral data from employees and customers provides a continuous stream of real-time information to feed machine learning algorithms.
In the healthcare industries, the resulting feedback loops produced by these algorithms dramatically improve patient outcomes and the customer experience across operations. For example, generative AI can help doctors and nurses reduce false positive diagnoses by analyzing both historical and real-time patient data more precisely than ever before. It also can help pharmacists write more accurate prescriptions by crediting or penalizing the machine learning models integrated into the pharmacy’s system based on a prescription’s accuracy.
In effect, generative AI helps hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical companies, and retail pharmacies learn how to improve their operations and outcomes without the need for continuous, costly, and, sometimes, erroneous human intervention.
Expanding Sensorability to Manage Inventory
Sensorability links inventory tracking with asset optimization by combining the power of IoT connectivity with prescriptive analytics to ensure continuous improvement and uninterrupted operational efficiency. Expanding sensorability increases the ability to track individual items in your inventory, segment them into their appropriate categories, and protect the assets that ensure optimal conditions.
Step One: Categorize Your Inventories
When optimizing inventory management, healthcare executives should consider their organization’s various types of inventories and their associated needs across the supply chain. Categorizing your consumable, service, and staff inventories is a good place to start.
Consumable Inventories
Consumable inventories ensure healthcare professionals can access the right materials they need to provide high-quality care. Included in this category are bandages, forceps, knives, and saline solutions, among many others. Although these items are most often used individually, in an emergency to meet an urgent need, single-use items may be removed from a tray of supplies with multiple SKUs— at the cost, unfortunately, of disposing the entire tray.
In critical situations, this practice may be necessary for delivery of quality patient care; however, if repeated routinely, such behavior can lead to inventory abuse and unnecessary waste. For this reason, leading healthcare organizations are working to better track waste—even segmenting their waste into 37 different streams, thereby building sustainability into their operations.
Service Inventories
Service inventories include assets used repeatedly to deliver essential care to patients, such as EKG machines, MRI machines, Zebra devices, hospital beds, and infusion pumps. Medical equipment generally falls into one of two types: mobile and stationary.
Each type has different needs for inventory tracking and management. Therefore, not only must the condition of the inventory be tracked, prevention of mechanical failure must be planned and managed.
Staff Inventories
Staff inventories include the doctors and nurses who administer care directly to patients. Medical professionals are the inventory most critical to a healthcare organization—time spent these experts is what hospitals are “selling.”
Infrastructure, therefore, should be designed and engineered to optimize the delivery of patient care. Every room, hallway, and piece of equipment must maximize the personal attention that patients expect and deserve.
Step Two: Consider Your Objectives
When expanding sensorability, healthcare executives must consider their objectives. Since it is the primary purpose of their organizations, patient care should act as the guiding objective with the highest priority. From online and in-person interactions to the food served onsite — everything touching the patient should contribute to maximizing care and satisfaction.
The sensorability expansion process begins with adding sensing capabilities to all relevant applications. Healthcare executives should consider where, when, and how additional visibility and insights would generate better decision-making and optimal operating procedures.
Note, for example, these locations and their associated conditions that can be improved with expanded sensorability:
- Patient rooms: ambient temperature and humidity
- Hospital beds: temperature, position, occupied status
- Refrigeration assets: product simulator, temperature, humidity, open-close status, electric current, energy consumption
- Operating rooms: oxygen, CO2, differential pressure, cleanliness, air pollution
- Hand washing stations: water consumption, soap use (volume), time spent washing hands
The sensor data gathered from these applications runs through a prescriptive analytics engine that provides guidance to employees and leadership alike to inform procedure changes, corrective actions, and behavior modification.
Once the added sensorability infrastructure is in place, location services can be easily added to equip healthcare professionals with the knowledge of where every piece of critical inventory is located at all times. From infusion devices and EKG machines to the nurses who provide bedside care and the cleaning crews who ensure sterile environments, consumable, service, and staff inventories are tracked to maximize the turnaround times of waiting rooms, operating rooms, and patient rooms while increasing the care capacity of the organization.
CVS Protects Billions of Dollars' Worth of Inventory with SmartSense
In today’s difficult healthcare labor market, there’s no better time for healthcare executives to consider ways they can manage their inventories better while improving asset optimization and empowering employees with tools that make their jobs easier. Increasing sensorability is the foundation for producing the guidance necessary for making better decisions that lead to improved patient care.
CVS is a great example of a healthcare organization doing just that. Like most retail pharmacies, CVS has several billion dollars' worth of cold chain product that they dispense and house in their pharmacies annually. They chose SmartSense to ensure they had accurate monitoring of their inventory to promote the highest levels of patient safety and to eliminate unnecessary product loss.
In this video, Molly Gombos, Lead Director, Retail Quality Standards at CVS Health, discusses the benefits to patients and healthcare professionals of expanded sensorability across the chain’s 9,000 locations nationwide.
