Emory Healthcare Tracks Its Pumps

Armed with this new data, Barros and his team can cross-reference lists of infusion pumps and registered patients in each ward.

"Say all soiled areas are empty [of infusion pumps]," Barros explains. "I can look on each floor and see how many are on each. Say there are 50 pumps in a certain wing but only 30 patients…that tells me that there are some used pumps there that need to be brought to the soiled utility and back into available inventory."

Occasionally, ambulance personnel remove an infusion pump used to support a patient being transferred to another facility. These technicians are supposed to bring their own infusion pumps for use while the patient is in transit, says Barros, but they sometimes forget to do so and often fail to return the infusion pumps they take. WhereNet location sensors have now been installed at the hospitals' exits, however, so when someone takes an infusion pump, the system can quickly remove it from available inventory.

Eventually, these sensors will trigger alerts sent to pagers worn by Barros and his team, enabling them to know as soon as an infusion pumps leaves the premises. The alerts will remind the team to check which ambulance services were removing patients at the time the location sensors read the pump's tag. Later, they can call the ambulance company and request the device be returned to the hospital.

The IntelliMotion software updates the inventory lists each time tagged devices are brought into or out of the doorways, or other chokepoints where location sensors have been installed.

Currently, the hospitals have not placed location sensors in each patient room in the wards being monitored, so staff must search for used pumps within the wards or hospital wings. Still, says Barros, the new system is an improvement over the old, though he does not yet have any specific data regarding how much time and money the hospitals are saving.

Barros says he looks forward to gaining enough data regarding pump utilization to determine whether the hospitals will end up renting additional infusion pumps, either because they are poorly managed—by failing to send used pumps to the soiled utility area in a timely manner, or through the hording of sterile pumps among nurses who worry they won't be able to access a clean pump when they want one—or because the hospitals' inventory of pumps is genuinely inadequate to meet demand.