Blyott Uses AWS IoT to Help Hospitals Easily Monitor Assets in Real-Time

Blyott uses an AWS-based IoT solution to track thousands of medical assets in real-time, meet business growth, help hospitals improve nursing efficiency, and saves at least $20,000 monthly. Based in Belgium and the Netherlands, the company provides IoT asset tracking and monitoring solutions to the healthcare industry. Blyott worked with AWS partner Sentia to create a serverless IoT platform based on AWS IoT and AWS Lambda for tracking medical assets.

Blyott, a Belgian/Dutch Internet of Things (IoT) solution provider, was founded with a clear vision: to help healthcare organizations easily monitor their assets. “A typical 500-bed hospital has a minimum of 5,000 assets, such as blood pressure monitors, refrigerator temperature monitors, and patches for recording heart beats,” says Gery Pollet, founder and managing director of Blyott. “We wanted to integrate all of those devices into a single solution to make tracking easier.”

To turn its vision into reality, the organization uses Bluetooth sensor technology and AI functionality to add better visibility into the use of hospital beds and other healthcare items. “It can be frustrating for hospital employees to regularly try to find beds or devices while they are used in another part of the hospital,” Pollet says. “This can also create unnecessary costs, because many hospitals buy 10–20 percent more portable equipment than they need.”

With the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Blyott realized the urgency of deploying its technology to assist hospitals during the crisis. “We needed to quickly scale the solution once we launched it, because hospitals were going to need to track beds very closely to accommodate more patients.”

To meet its needs, Blyott engaged technology provider Sentia to build a platform for the new monitoring service based on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Operating from Ghent, Belgium, Sentia is an Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) and an AWS Managed Service Provider. “We chose AWS because it offered the best technical solution for our needs,” says Pollet.

Sentia worked closely with Blyott to develop and implement the serverless Smart Healthcare Platform (SHP) based on AWS services. The solution streams asset data from Bluetooth sensors on medical beds and other devices through AWS IoT Core and Amazon Kinesis. The SHP solution uses AWS Lambda for processing events and scaling quickly in a cost-effective way. The data is stored in Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB databases, and the solution complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Nurses and other hospital workers use smartphones, tablets, or PCs to access the data through a web-based application built using advanced REST APIs. “Customers have a simple web interface for monitoring each asset,” says Pollet. In addition, the SHP uses machine learning algorithms to analyze asset utilization and enable predictive maintenance.

With the SHP solution, hospitals can take advantage of AWS Lambda to process thousands of events in seconds. “Using the Smart Healthcare Platform on AWS, hospitals can easily track and monitor beds, patient movement, wheelchairs, and other inventory while sensing refrigerator temperature and air quality,” says Pollet. “As a result, they can take action and make more-educated decisions about asset allocation. For example, by identifying exactly where a bed is located in a hospital, they can better divide the hospital space based on actual use.”

Because of its serverless AWS architecture, the SHP solution is highly scalable, which has led to rapid business growth for Blyott. The solution has now been implemented in 10 hospitals in Belgium and the Netherlands, and the company plans to expand in coming months.

“Running our business on AWS allowed us to bring a disruptive solution to market that is up to 75 percent more affordable than other tracking solutions for hospitals,” says Pollet. “This has enabled us to grow our business quickly and focus on the functionality, not the backend management.”

Hospitals using the SHP solution can improve nurse scheduling because the SHP provides comprehensive analyses of room occupancy and visits, in addition to the number of beds and other assets in use in each room.

“Nurses can sometimes spend up to one hour every day searching for equipment,” says Pollet. “By tracking assets more closely, in real time, hospitals can optimize the efficiency of the nursing staff and ensure they are spending time with patients instead of looking for beds.”

Blyott is reducing operational costs each month by running a serverless platform and offloading solution management to AWS.

“We don’t have large IT costs because we can rely on AWS for the management,” explains Pollet. “If we attempted to provide a solution like this in an on-premises environment, we would need several full-time engineers to maintain and manage everything. By using AWS to manage the platform, we save at least $20,000 every month.”

Next, Blyott plans to expand its SHP solution into additional hospitals. “As a startup, we were able to quickly launch our business and add functionality that larger companies could not provide, because we are on AWS,” says Pollet. “We look forward to continuing to help hospitals control costs, increase staff efficiency, and contribute to better health outcomes.”