Description: The leading hospital and healthcare system in Central Pennsylvania, offering services from prenatal to geriatrics; includes 546-bed Harrisburg Hospital and 148-bed Community Hospital.

Challenge: Poor communication around patient surgical status contributing to inefficient workflow and patient throughput; staff frustration around delays, inefficiencies; too much time wasted “hunting and gathering” every type and size of equipment – thermometers, walkers, pumps, stretchers; asset shrinkage

Solution: Extended initial patient tracking application, as part of a perioperative workflow application, to hospital-wide asset tracking; both applications work on the Radianse real-time location system (RTLS) platform. When complete, the Radianse RTLS will let hospital staff across the PinnacleHealth system immediately locate as many as 10,000 devices – among the largest active-RFID deployments in healthcare. The Radianse system will also alert staff when equipment moves between the two sites. Have used both wired and wireless (Wi-Fi) receivers to reduce installation costs. Will use the latest one-year, reusable active-RFID tag for small equipment, rental equipment and patient tracking. Hospital staff can track equipment across and between the two sites.

Benefits: Transforming perioperative workflow to increase patient safety, automate processes and measure significant clinical events; keeping clinicians hospital-wide focused on patient care by reducing the need to ‘hunt and gather’ equipment, 5,000 devices tagged to date, including keys to pain-controlled anesthesia (PCA) pumps, wheelchairs, defibrillators, beds, stretchers – even vacuum cleaners

The return on investment from real-time asset tracking came in just 12 months for PinnacleHealth’s flagship 546-bed Harrisburg Hospital, representing $900,000 in savings.

In their words:

“Knowing where everything is has a huge impact on our overall efficiency as an organization, and consequently on our cost-effectiveness… we’ve been absolutely inundated with requests to tag more equipment.

“We know that it works and has since the first day, when every tagged vacuum cleaner was returned to its rightful place. We know when the ED transfers a patient with a pulse oximeter. We can find a wheelchair when a patient needs one. The hallways aren’t crowded with beds because alerts go off if one is left in a corridor for more than 15 minutes – and we have used that data to make process changes.

“We will put a tag on just about anything – not just expensive items. If a nurse has to spend time searching for it, it’s worth it to tag it. We want our nurses to be where they want to be: at the bedside providing service, feeling effective and being efficient.

“Search time is a considerable ROI factor to the point that nurse managers today will not accept new equipment without RFID tags.”

George Morley
Director Biomedical Engineering

“We faced capacity constraints in the OR that we were able to address by improving the efficiency of patient flow. This is primarily a sophisticated communication tool for our staff, allowing them to see what’s going on at a glance, anticipate needs and eliminate surprises. Its effectiveness depends on a very robust indoor location system that has the granularity — the very specific location pinpointing ability — that we need to accomplish our goals.”

Dr. Craig Wisman
Vice President of Medical Affairs

“We opted to avoid the potential risk of Wi-Fi-based location interfering with other wireless systems in the hospital. Also, a hospital is a constantly changing environment. It’s not like a warehouse. If access points get moved during construction or renovation here, the impact on location is significant.”

In the News
PinnacleHealth in Healthcare Informatics, Feb 2009
 
Press Release
PinnacleHealth extends Radianse Reveal asset tracking to Community Hospital
 
Press Release
AAMI education session
If It Moves - Tag It
presented by George Morley of Pinnacle Health