By Elizabeth Wasserman

Aug. 1, 2007—Three years ago, Brigham and Women's Hospital, a 747-bed nonprofit in Boston affiliated with Harvard Medical School, had a terrible problem with portable medical devices and equipment disappearing from its many wings and units. Each year, the hospital had to replace 100 percent of its 12-lead EKG cables, 36 percent of its temporary cardiac pacers and 9 percent of its telemetry transmitters, among other devices. Equipment losses cost the hospital hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, not to mention the labor costs involved when nurses and other staff members had to hunt for missing devices throughout the 17-story hospital.

Hospital executives realized they needed a better way to track equipment. In 2005, they introduced a real-time indoor positioning solution from Radianse, in which active (battery-powered) RFID tags were applied to the cables, pacers and transmitters. During the yearlong pilot, the hospital lost only two transmitters and two cables. The staff also discovered how some items had disappeared: Cables and pacers got caught in bed sheets and were sent to the laundry, and nurses hid equipment in closets or behind ceiling tiles so it would be on hand when needed.

Medical facilities adopting RFID to track assets, patients and information are not only improving patient safety and services—they're also saving money.

"Hospitals hire clinicians to care for patients. They don't hire people to chase equipment," says Michael Fraai, director of biomedical engineering for Brigham and Women's Hospital. "Through process changes, we realized we could minimize losses."