Physical Therapist Builds Hospital Inventory Tool, Hits Performance Wall With Hundreds of Thousands of Items

A physical therapist with prior research experience volunteered to help build a digital inventory system, called EasyFS, for a hospital conducting its first full stock count in over two decades. The tool was designed to let departments log supplies by room and drawer, with unique codes assigned to each item for easy searching. As the inventory grew into the hundreds of thousands of entries, the tool began freezing noticeably during searches, frustrating both the builder and end users. Investigating the slowdown revealed that the system ran on Google Apps Script, meaning every query had to route through remote servers, adding unavoidable latency. Seeking a faster alternative, the developer began exploring whether running the tool on an in-house server, such as the office's shared NAS drive, could resolve the performance issues.