Some of healthcare’s most expensive equipment shortages aren’t shortages at all. They’re visibility failures.
A hospital can own enough infusion pumps, monitors, or mobile diagnostic equipment and still have clinicians struggling to find what they need. The problem is not always insufficient capacity. Sometimes the capacity is already there—distributed across departments, waiting for cleaning or maintenance, sitting idle, or represented inaccurately in systems that no longer reflect what is happening on the floor.
That distinction matters because the default response to an equipment shortage is often to buy or rent more. Sometimes that is necessary. But before adding capacity, healthcare leaders should be asking a more uncomfortable question: Are we actually short on equipment, or are we making capital decisions because we cannot see and use what we already own?
I’ve spent much of my career thinking about how organizations manage the technology and equipment their operations depend on, and I’ve seen this problem in many asset-intensive environments. The issue is rarely just whether an asset exists. What matters is whether the people who need it have enough current, reliable information to make the right decision.
In healthcare, that distinction is especially important. Equipment moves frequently, several teams may be responsible for different parts of its lifecycle, and incomplete information creates extra work across clinical, biomedical, IT, finance, and operations teams.
That is why I believe healthcare leaders need to think about asset visibility as more than equipment tracking. The goal is not simply to know what the organization owns. It is to understand those assets well enough to use existing capacity more effectively.
Visibility Has to Go Beyond Location
Location matters, particularly for mobile equipment. But it answers only one question.
If I know that a ventilator is on the third floor, I know where to look for it. I still do not know whether it is in use, whether it is ready for another patient, whether maintenance is due, who is responsible for it, or whether an IT or security issue requires attention.
Useful visibility has to answer a broader set of questions: What is the asset? Where is it? Is it available? What condition is it in? Who is responsible for it? And if it is connected, is it being managed appropriately?
Healthcare organizations often already have much of this information, but it may be spread across several systems and teams. Clinical engineering may know the maintenance history, IT may know how the device appears on the network, and the department using it may know whether it is actually available.
Not every system needs to hold the same information. But they should be able to agree that they are referring to the same device. Otherwise, each team may hold part of the picture while no one has enough context to act confidently.
Look at Existing Capacity Before Buying More
There is a straightforward financial reason to get this right.
When organizations lack a reliable view of how equipment is being used, buying more can become the easiest response to an availability problem. I have seen the same pattern in other asset-intensive environments. Some assets are rarely used. Others sit idle in one location while another team experiences a shortage. Equipment may remain unavailable because a cleaning, maintenance, inspection, or transfer status was never updated.
Healthcare is more complex than many other operating environments, and there will be cases where additional equipment is genuinely required. Better visibility is not an argument against procurement. It is a way to make better procurement decisions.
Before approving additional capacity, leaders should be able to review utilization, availability, downtime, maintenance history, and equipment nearing replacement. A department may have a strong case for additional devices, but leadership should first determine whether demand has truly increased or whether usable capacity is simply difficult to locate, redistribute, or return to service.
The same visibility can reduce avoidable work for staff. A nurse should not have to search several areas of a hospital for a device that a system says is available.
A 2023 time-and-motion study published in Scientific Reports found that nurses in one hospital ward spent 11.8% of observed work time on “associated work,” which included searching for supplies or equipment. The study was limited to one setting and should not be generalized across healthcare, but it shows how quickly nonclinical tasks can accumulate.
Asset visibility does not solve clinician burnout. It can, however, remove some of the unnecessary coordination surrounding clinical work.
Connected Devices Change the Visibility Problem
Physical equipment and technology assets are becoming harder to separate.
A connected medical device may have a network identity, software or firmware dependencies, security requirements, and access controls in addition to its maintenance and operational history.
The FDA describes medical device cybersecurity as a shared responsibility among manufacturers, healthcare facilities, healthcare providers, patients, and other stakeholders. That responsibility becomes harder to manage when an organization cannot reliably identify a device, determine where it is deployed, or establish who is responsible for it.
A connected device that is missing from an organization’s managed asset view can create a security blind spot. Teams may not know its software state or whether it should still be connected.
The regulatory direction is worth watching as well. HHS’s proposed changes to the HIPAA Security Rule would require regulated entities to develop and periodically revise a technology asset inventory and a network map showing the movement of electronic protected health information. That remains a proposed rule, not a final requirement.
The broader point is that operational visibility and cybersecurity visibility increasingly depend on the same foundation: knowing what the asset is and how it fits into the environment.
Technology Alone Won’t Fix Visibility
One lesson I’ve learned repeatedly is that organizations often buy technology before agreeing on the decision it is supposed to improve. Visibility initiatives are no exception.
Tags, scanners, readers, and sensors can all be useful. But detecting an asset does not automatically tell a team whether the information attached to it is accurate or whether the asset is available for use.
Another common problem is creating one more silo. If clinical engineering, IT, finance, and operations already maintain different records for the same device, adding another database without reconciling asset identities can increase the work rather than reduce it.
And information has to lead somewhere. If a device requires maintenance, the appropriate team needs to receive the work. If equipment is underused, there needs to be a process for reassignment. If a connected device presents a security concern, IT or security needs to know.
In my experience, visibility becomes useful only when teams can act on the information.
Start With One Problem
Healthcare organizations do not need to make every asset visible at the same level from day one.
I would start with one operational problem. Perhaps clinicians regularly struggle to locate specific shared equipment. Maybe biomedical technicians cannot find devices when scheduled maintenance is due. Or one facility may be renting equipment while another appears to have unused capacity.
Start there and identify the decision being made under conditions of incomplete information. Then make sure the asset has a consistent identity across all systems involved, and link status changes to the appropriate workflow, whether that is maintenance, cleaning, inspection, reassignment, security review, or retirement.
I would also prove the approach with one meaningful class of equipment before expanding it. Mobile, expensive, constrained, shared, or difficult-to-manage assets are often better starting points than trying to track everything equally.
The goal is not to collect as much data as possible. It is to show that better information leads to better decisions.
Visibility Has to Lead to Action
Different teams need asset visibility for different reasons. A clinical team may need to know what equipment is available and ready for use. A biomedical technician may need to locate a device for scheduled maintenance. An IT leader may need to determine whether a connected device is being appropriately managed. An executive team may need to understand whether demand truly exceeds capacity before approving another purchase.
These are different decisions, but they depend on the same basic capability: reliable information about an asset and its current context.
That is why I believe healthcare organizations should look beyond equipment tracking. Knowing where an asset is matters. Knowing whether it is available, usable, maintained, appropriately managed, and still worth keeping is far more useful.
Health systems will continue to invest in new technology, and in many cases, they should. But before adding more equipment to an already complex environment, leaders should make sure they have enough visibility to make better use of what they already own.
About Syed Ali
Syed Ali is the founder and CEO of EZO, where he focuses on how technology and asset intelligence can help organizations make better operational decisions. He has more than 25 years of experience across enterprise organizations, mid-sized companies, and startups.
