 |
|
|
|
|
Excerpt from Health Management Technology On Track The need to identify and track healthcare entities within the healthcare delivery process—whether they be equipment, medications, devices, patients or staff—has never been greater. Information technology is at the ready to serve. Here is a look at how three healthcare organizations address their own challenges of identification and tracking. Richard R. Rogoski, Contributing Editor Keeping track of expensive equipment, key staff members, administered medications and patients themselves can save hospitals time and money while boosting day-to-day efficiencies. How often does a piece of equipment that normally resides in one department mysteriously find its way to another department? How many times has a staff member not been able to hear an intercom page? How uncertain are nursing supervisors that every patient in their unit was given the right meds at the right time? And how often are patients stacked in admissions until enough beds become available? With the refinement of technologies such as radio frequency identification devices (RFIDs), bar-coding and bed-tracking software, more and more hospital administrators are starting to answer those questions with a resounding, "Never." Tagged and Located As an emerging technology with widespread use in a number of verticals, RFID is also proving to be an effective tool in healthcare. At Yale-New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Conn., for example, RFID technology is being used to track down equipment. "Equipment was being moved in and out of units and not being returned," says Joe Lederer, director of perioperative support systems. "It was not an issue of equipment being stolen, just an issue of departments that paid for equipment not getting that equipment returned. The end result was wasted labor hours searching out needed equipment." While Yale-New Haven is licensed for 944 beds, the hospital has three patient towers with access shared among the three. On the third floor of one building are 21 rooms that comprise the inpatient OR. On the third floor of the second building are 10 rooms for the outpatient OR. In the third building is the pediatric OR with five rooms. Not only was it difficult to hunt down equipment that might have been moved from one building to another, Lederer says, "but finding something even in the same building could be a challenge." There had to be a simple and effective way to keep track of equipment, he reasoned. Four years ago, the hospital began using bar codes on instrument sets and today still uses bar-code technology to inventory and manage instrument sets and supplies in operating rooms and supply storerooms. But bar-coding technology is only as good as the staff's adherence to scanning at each scan location. "Every year the hospital develops a business plan and process, and technology is part of that business plan," Lederer explains. The hospital reviewed RFID's applicability and decided to test its effectiveness. Yale-New Haven also decided to pilot the technology in the operating rooms that are extremely equipment-intensive. The search for an applicable RFID system led the hospital's IT department to Lawrence, Mass.-based Radianse Inc., a company that shipped its first commercial indoor positioning solution (IPS) in December 2003. The location accuracy of the Radianse IPS had already been documented at virtually 100 percent as a result of a double-blind, peer-reviewed study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2003. That study was funded in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. By January 2005, 10 hospitals were using Radianse systems. Yale-New Haven implemented the wireless, Web-based Radianse IPS at the start of June 2005, Lederer says, and installed the necessary wireless infrastructure on the third floor of each tower to accommodate the ORs and the cardiothoracic ICU. The basement also was wired to track equipment in central supply, as well as in basement areas where tagged items could end up if inadvertently discarded. Approximately 1,000 pieces of equipment, including supply carts, were "tagged" using reusable, programmable tags, Lederer says. Simple to program, the tags can send hospital-defined alerts such as "equipment tag removal" or "equipment leaving defined usage perimeter." Because these are "active" tags, they include a battery that sends out a signal every 10 seconds, which is picked up by wall-mounted wireless receivers. Where's My Manager? Finding a piece of equipment is as simple as selecting an icon on a PC's desktop and clicking "find equipment," which then presents an inventory of all tagged equipment and their location in either list or map format. Lederer says the system is getting about 25 hits a day from staffers looking for equipment.
"It was not an issue of equipment being stolen, just an issue of departments that paid for equipment not getting that equipment returned." Although receivers were not installed on the other floors of each tower, the hospital currently is working with Radianse to develop a cart-mounted PC with an attached receiver. Traveling those floors with the cart would enable a staff member to find equipment that may have been moved out of the OR. If the OR pilot is successful and the remaining floors are covered with the appropriate infrastructure, this cart would no longer be needed and an entirely new set of tracking applications would open up. Yale-New Haven also has begun to track operating room department managers using RFID tags. "It's a good way to begin to experiment with the 'find staff' functionality to identify where critical managers are when we need them," Lederer says, adding that the hospital also has asked Radianse to "come up with a ‘blueprint of movement,' showing lines or paths of tag movement during a shift." Lederer admits it will take time for some of the staff to overcome the Orwellian notion that wearing an RFID tag means Big Brother is watching their every move, but the organization itself has made progress in this direction. In fact, Lederer, like 25 other Yale-New Haven managers, now sports an RFID tag. "Our goal is to get people used to seeing us wearing these tags, so it's perceived as a positive development," he says. By September 2006, the hospital plans to begin tracking patients as well. For that project, Radianse single-use active RFID tags, which are wristwatch-size devices, may be used. Continue to full online article...
|
|
|
||||||
|
| © 2007-2008 Radianse |
|
