Excerpt from Healthcare Informatics
October 2006
Full article is available at Healthcare Informatics Online

Tracking the Good

Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital is making use of RFID to reduce inventory shrinkage.

by Stacey Kramer

Executives at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) needed a better way to track assets and eliminate the need for nurses to hunt down key medical equipment, says BWH CIO Sue Schade. After all, when essential medical equipment goes missing at the 747-bed nonprofit Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate, it's the nurses who end up trying to locate them.

“They didn't go to nursing school to spend time being hunters and gatherers,” Schade says.

To choose an equipment tracking vendor, BWH developed a criteria matrix. The Massachusetts hospital wanted something that would match its IS and electronic medication administration record (eMAR) infrastructure, was Web-enabled and had active radio frequency identification (RFID). Lawrence, Mass.-based Radianse was a match.

In doing a year-long pilot with the Radianse system, BWH was able to discover where its inventory shrinkage was coming from, track it in real time with the indoor positioning system and change the hospital's organization process to correct the problem.

BWH is now tagging its most expensive assets — from a $1,000 pulse oximeter to a $15,000 mobile monitor. The hospital plans to tag 6,000 assets, and gross savings projections are $300,000 per year.

Continue to full article at Healthcare Informatics Online

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