RFID to Track High-Cost Items at Columbus Children's Heart Center

At the start of a surgical procedure, the staff member tasked with collecting the necessary tools and devices for the physicians will present a bar-coded name badge to a scanner built into the master cabinet. The bar-code scanner is linked to a screen that allows the employee to input the name of the patient and the physician, linking every item taken from the cabinet with the patient, doctor and circulation person. If an item were to be removed for a procedure but determined to be the wrong size, it could be taken back to the cabinet and exchanged for a different item, and the cabinet's RFID interrogator would send that amended information to the hospital database. In that way, the staff is saved the added time of writing or scanning information specific to items taken from or returned to the cabinet.

The Heart Center tags all items valued at more than $100. Rather than outright purchasing the iRISupply system—which is priced at $260,000 for 13 cabinets and the iRISynergy software—the center is renting the system with an option to buy it in the future. In the meantime, Olshove says, "We will be tracking what our savings are." He predicts the system could save the hospital 10 to 15 percent in lost charges, though the hospital declines to indicate the total dollar value of its lost charges over an average year.

Under the previous setup, staff sometimes used items on patients without billing for them, simply because they were overlooked. The new system makes that impossible. At the end of each day, a hospital employee will run a report on all items removed from the shelves, including on whom they were used, then base invoicing on those reports. Olshove expects to see reduced wastage now that the hospital will be better able to track which items need to be replaced, which do not and those that must be used first due to an approaching expiration date.

Christianson likens non-RFID based inventory-management systems to a newspaper vending machine—when a customer pays for a newspaper, this unlocks the vending machine's door, forcing the newsstand operator to trust the buyer to take only one copy. "In circumstances when folks don't comply with a system such as bar coding," Christianson says, "you have a problem. It makes you very dependent on personnel operating it correctly."

He adds, "With the RFID system, there's no need to manually operate the system. That's the real difference with our technology."

Other hospitals that have deployed iRISupply include the Heart Hospital Baylor Plano in Collin County, Texas (see New Heart Hospital Plans Major RFID Operation) and King's Daughters Medical Center (KDMC) in Ashland, Ky., b (see King's Daughters Expands Its RFID Tracking System).