From the May 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Thus far, tags are being applied to equipment such as telemetry transmitters; vital-signs monitors; wheelchairs; infusion, PCA and sequential pumps; bladder scanners; patient lifters; EKG machines; moveable computers and printers; as well as to food trays.
Hospital kitchen and planning personnel can track when food leaves the kitchen and is delivered to holding areas and then to patients on the floors. RFID technology has helped to provide objective timestamps showing response times and potential process gaps.
Experimentation is key to maximizing the benefits of RFID
To simplify daily reporting and RFID data use by operational management, NWH has designed its own dynamic 60-second self-refreshing reports about PAR levels, the incorrect assignments of tagged items (such as assets congregating on the wrong floor), and the dwelling times of equipment being repaired.
The selection of appropriate tags required biomedical experimentation. The hospital initially intended to use a single universal RFID tag that could be applied to all assets, but found that some tags work better than others on specific items. We are now using one rigid tag for flat surfaces, a flexible adhesive washable tag for curved surfaces, and a fabric tag that can be stitched directly into an asset, such as a wheelchair or specialized mattresses. The tags selected and tested by NWH have also been validated in Quake Global's lab.
Our initial goals to validate RFID sensitivity on medical equipment, to reliably trace equipment flows, to create notifications and integrate that tracking data into NWH's environmental readiness process have been achieved. In addition, we use RFID data to quickly find movable equipment for biomedical inspections, as well as for some internal investigations.
Looking ahead, the next step will involve identifying how the technology can be used to optimize other business processes by capturing and analyzing the assets/patients/providers data correlation.
Subjectively, reports from NWH nurses indicating that they couldn't immediately find the equipment they needed, have stopped. In addition, the hospital uses RFID analytics to determine utilization of movable equipment and validate necessity of the new capital purchases.
