Authors: Joseph Kannry, MD, Susan Emro, Marion Blount, Maria Ebling, Division of Clinical Informatics, Department of Performance Management Mount Sinai Medical Center, NY, NY, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY

Abstract:
RFID technology shows significant potential for transforming healthcare, yet few studies assess this potential. Our study measured the effectiveness of using RFID as a bed trigger: a tool to accelerate identification of empty beds. We made a small alteration in the discharge process to associate RFID tags with patients and created an RFID-based system that automatically determined discharge time. For each patient, we evaluated the difference in the discharge times recorded manually by the current process and the RFID-based system. The study was conducted on 86 patients over 2 months in 2 physically separate multi-specialty units. Compared to the preexisting process, the RFIDbased system identified empty beds >20 minutes earlier 67% of the time with an average of 25 minutes and median of 9 minutes earlier. Hospital leadership defined an improvement of ~10 minutes as significant. With minimal investment, our small-scale study lead hospital leadership to begin planning RFID deployment.

Continue to full report (.pdf)