PinnacleHealth Pushes Ahead With RFID

PinnacleHealth's Harrisburg and Community campuses perform a total of about 23,000 surgeries annually, and Frank estimates that the RFID patient-tracking system has documented as many as 45,000 patients' surgeries. "It's been an excellent communications tool," she says, particularly because it provides hospital staff with real-time information about a patient's status, which the staff can readily share with family members.

In July, the hospital took the communications capability a step further, linking the RFID tracking system to a plasma screen message board that displays patient status, much like an airport's electronic screens displays airplane take-offs and landings.

"Before, if a family member checked in with the receptionist's desk to find out the status of a patient, where he was and how he was doing, the receptionist would have to call the various areas to find out," Frank says. Now, family members can check a plasma screen hanging on the wall of the OR waiting room. Using a five-digit code supplied when the patient checked in, they can look for the code on the screen to see where the patient is location.

The patient-tracking system's success encouraged the hospital to add asset-tracking at Harrisburg Campus. According to George Morley, director of biomedical engineering at PinnacleHealth, tags have now been affixed to about 2,500 assets, with 450 receivers installed in hallways, rooms, elevator bays and other areas.

The asset-tracking capability is already proving its worth, Morley says. Shortly after he started working with the health-care organization more than 20 years ago, he sat in on a meeting in which staff discussed the difficulty involved in tracking wheelchairs throughout the facility. "And we kept having these discussions about wheelchair accessibility," Morley recalls. "At least quarterly, we'd have to make a sweep of the entire hospital to find the wheelchairs because, yes, people would hoard them."

Now, when caregivers need to find a specific item, they can access the Radianse software program from any computer in the hospital. There, staff members can search for a type of device, or can enter a device’s serial number in order to locate a specific piece of equipment,. "I thought this was going to be a hard sell to get the [employees] to use it," says Morley, "but it ended up being just the opposite. The departments use it constantly to keep track of all their equipment."

Hospital staff can also use the system to find IV pumps, which require regular software upgrades. The system can also be employed to track defibrillators, crash carts and other critical life-support equipment. This helps make sure the devices are regularly inspected.

In the future, PinnacleHealth will continue to tag more items at Harrisburg Campus, and Morley hopes to implement asset-tracking capabilities at Community Campus as well. "I've put it in the budget to expand there," he says, "and I'm hoping we'll be able to."