Every hospital that joined the system through a merger brought its own medication dispensing cabinets and infusion pumps with it, and over time that left three distinct generations of equipment running side by side across all 12 hospitals. Nobody held a single inventory of what was actually installed where, so basic questions, how many devices, which platform, which hospital, took weeks to answer instead of minutes.

Because there was no consolidated view, service contracts for the overlapping platforms simply kept renewing on their own schedules, with different teams managing different vendor relationships and little visibility into whether any given contract still matched what was in use. Firmware ages were unknown across the fleet, so nobody could say with confidence which devices were still receiving security updates and which had quietly fallen behind.

The gap showed up hardest at the bedside. Pump data reached the electronic health record automatically at some hospitals but not others, so nurses at the unintegrated sites had to read infusion numbers off the pump and key them into the chart by hand, doubling the documentation work on every shift and adding a point where transcription errors could creep in.

We treated the assessment as a single structured programme run across all 12 hospitals rather than site-by-site audits. Network discovery tools mapped every connected device automatically, and physical walkthroughs at each hospital confirmed what the network scans found and caught anything sitting off the network entirely, building a device-level inventory the health system had never had.

With the inventory in hand, we scored each dispensing and infusion platform on integration depth, security posture and support status, giving leadership a like-for-like comparison instead of competing vendor pitches. Every existing contract was mapped against actual device usage, exposing which agreements covered equipment that was barely deployed and which had quietly kept overlapping platforms alive past their usefulness.

The output was a single board-approved roadmap: one target platform named, and a sequenced three-year plan for migrating hospitals onto it and retiring the rest. Sequencing gave priority to the hospitals with the worst pump-to-EHR gaps, so the sites forcing nurses into manual double documentation were among the first scheduled to move.