In The News
Excerpt from RFID Journal
October 2009
Full article is available online at www.rfidjournal.com
Massachusetts General Uses RFID to Better Understand Its Clinics
A patient- and employee-tracking system, provided by Radianse, will enable the Boston hospital's clinics to gather complex information regarding patient flow and bottlenecks, with the goal of improving care.
By Claire Swedberg
Oct. 23, 2009—After several years of testing RFID to track patients and staff members in its operating room (OR) department, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) is now rolling out the same technology in a more challenging environment in which patient movement is not nearly as predictable—at medical clinics throughout the Boston area. Provided by Radianse, the system, known as Radianse Reveal, includes active 433 MHz RFID tags in the form of badges worn by workers and patients. Thus far, three clinics are employing Radianse Reveal, with the system slated to go live at another five locations by the end of the first quarter of 2010.
"Our incentive is to gain a better understanding of how our clinical systems behave," says James Stahl, a medical doctor and senior scientist with MGH's Institute for Technology Assessment. Unlike the tracking of assets or patients through an OR, tracking patients' movements through a clinic, Stahl says, "is a very complex system in terms of how resources are managed."
While the goal is to provide patients with better access to care, understanding the movements of those patients and the care they receive is a daunting task that must be undertaken before MGH can determine how such a scenario can be improved. No patient is like any other, nor are his or her conditions and the treatments he or she requires. Although clinics can use anecdotal evidence to determine whether care is being provided as efficiently as possible, without a good means of measuring each visit, it's difficult to know what improvements to make. For example, it's not easy to track where delays had occurred, whether a physician spent the proper time with a patient, or how long a patient sat alone in an examining room.