Excerpt from APICS, January 2007

Where's My Defibrillator?
More effectively tracking hospital assets

by Christopher M. Wright

George Morley didn’t have to sell his hospital staff on a radio frequency identification (RFID) equipment tracking system. The system sold itself.

Morley, director of biomedical engineering at PinnacleHealth, was nearly finished installing a tracking system at one of his company’s two hospi-tals in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when he got a call from the cardiac care department about two missing defibrillators. This was before everyone in the company, which has 800 beds combined, had access to the new system. The department already had confronted likely culprits with no success. Luckily, the devices had been tagged, and the system located one defibrillator on a shelf and the other in a utility room in the intensive care unit. Word got around, and Morley was deluged with calls to tag more and more items.

“People have been frustrated for years because they buy something—particularly small items—and it never stays where it’s supposed to,” Morley says. Staff members spend hours looking and often end up ordering new items because the old ones can’t be found.

Morley started examining positioning systems five years ago. He consid-ered infrared and Wi-Fi vendors and tested various systems on a small scale. Subsequently, in early 2005, PinnacleHealth adopted a patient January 2007 APICS magazine tracking system from Lawrence, Massachusetts-based Radianse Inc.

In December of that year, Morley began installing Radianse’s equip-ment tracking component at room and zone levels. The accuracy of Radianse’s positioning system is virtually 100 percent, as docu-mented by a 2003 double-blind, peer-reviewed study at Massachusetts General Hospital funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.

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