East Kent Hospitals reap the benefits of medical device tracking with RFID

MILTON KEYNES, U.K. - Feb. 27, 2017 - PRLog -- Using Harland Simon's RFiD Discovery system to track over 5,000 medical devices including 1,000 beds, East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust (EKHUFT) is experiencing multiple cost and efficiency improvements:

The use of active RFID tracking has considerably reduced the time spent by clinical and engineering staff looking for devices, improved utilisation levels of equipment, increased patient safety and helped drive down the need for ad-hoc device hires. Supporting their three medical equipment libraries, RFiD Discovery helps keep track of devices across EKHUFT's three major acute hospital sites.

RFID Discovery enables hospitals to easily locate medical devices using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). Each device is fitted with an active RFID tag, which sends a regular message to a network of fixed readers placed at various locations throughout each hospital. In addition, mobile readers are used by the clinical engineering team to audit wards in a fraction of the time it used to take.

For Dr. Tony Beaumont, Anaesthetic Consultant and Head of the Medical Devices Group at EKHUFT, of the most important improvements is the time saving: "Ward staff now spend less time finding equipment and more time actually using it for patient care. The nursing teams have great faith in the libraries and their use has been one of the success stories of our medical equipment management."

Before introducing RFiD Discovery, infusion pumps were regularly in short supply and staff were frequently requesting more pumps to be purchased. Andy Barrow, EME Services Manager at EKHUFT comments: "The RFID system highlighted an excess of 98 infusion pumps, costing at total of around £150,000. These have now temporarily been removed from circulation and will be available to meet our growing demand. This means the Trust will not need to purchase infusion pumps for a considerable amount of time."

The management of hired devices has also improved. Tagging dynamic mattresses has helped greatly to identify hired ones among those owned by the Trust. When it was time to return a hired mattress staff had to physically check the serial number of each one, which was time consuming and intrusive for patients. Andy Barrow comments: "Now we can identify hired mattresses quickly with a simple RFID scan without disturbing patients. It's also saving a huge amount of time and has delivered significant savings by avoiding late return fines and unnecessary rental charges."

Following the success with active RFID, the Trust is now starting to label all medical devices with passive RFID tags to achieve GS1 compliance. The new passive tags replace existing asset labels and will be read using a specialist RFiD Discovery trolley.

To view the full case study please visit http://www.rfiddiscovery.com/east-kent-case-study