Integrated Business Systems & Services Inc (IBSS)

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“Where’s My DEFIBRILLATOR?”
BY CHRISTOPHER M. WRIGHT
January 2007 APICS magazine
BY CHRISTOPHER M. WRIGHT

http://www.apics.org/NR/rdonlyres/541CEC83-A9BF-4B79-BFCE-9D5BADB25C02/0/2833_Jan07.pdf

George Morley didn’t have to sell his hospital staff on a radio frequency identification (RFID) equipment tracking system. The system sold itself.

Morley, director of biomedical engineering at PinnacleHealth, was nearly finished installing a tracking system at one of his company’s two hospitals in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when he got a call from the cardiac care department about two missing defibrillators. This was before everyone in the company, which has 800 beds combined, had access to the new system. The department already had confronted likely culprits with no success. Luckily, the devices had been tagged, and the system located one defibrillator on a shelf and the other in a utility room in the intensive care unit. Word got around, and Morley was deluged with calls to tag more and more items.

“People have been frustrated for years because they buy something— particularly small items—and it never stays where it’s supposed to,” Morley says. Staff members spend hours looking and often end up ordering new items because the old ones can’t be found.

Morley started examining positioning systems five years ago. He considered infrared and Wi-Fi vendors and tested various systems on a small scale. Subsequently, in early 2005, PinnacleHealth adopted a patient tracking system from Lawrence, Massachusetts-based Radianse Inc.

In December of that year, Morley began installing Radianse’s equipment tracking component at room and zone levels. The accuracy of Radianse’s positioning system is virtually 100 percent, as documented by a 2003 double-blind, peerreviewed study at Massachusetts General Hospital funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.

Morley initially ordered 4,000 equipment tags and has ordered 4,000 more. Additional thousands will be needed for the program PinnacleHealth leaders intend to roll out at their second hospital in 2007. Equipment moves from one facility to the other, and Morley will be able to track it between hospitals when the system is completed.

Relatively few hospitals have RFID equipment tracking today, but the technology is on the cusp of widespread adoption, many observers say. Radianse installed its first system in 2003 and had systems in 20 hospitals by November 2006.

Paul Mathans, manager of emerging technology and RFID solutions for the consulting firm BearingPoint Inc., also sees interest picking up. “RFID can be used to address the core issues of hospital management,” he says, noting that locationing solutions have implications for equipment, patients, pharmaceuticals, and workflow procedures.