Florida Hospital to Use RFID to Track Implantable Cardiac Devices

At that time, the device will be removed from the cabinet, the interrogator of which will no longer be able to read its tag, thereby prompting the CIMS software to indicate the item as being outside the cabinet. When the device is brought to the room in which it will be implanted, a worker will key an event identifier—a numeric code up to eight characters long, previously generated for billing purposes by the Lumedx Apollo Cardiovascular Information System when the patient's procedure was scheduled—into a computer. The employee then uses a stationary RFID interrogator to read the tag attached to the device to be used.

This association between the specific device implanted and the billing information is where the interface between the WaveMark and Apollo platforms takes place. Once interrogated, the RFID tag ID for each device used in a given procedure is associated with the patient for which that item is used, as well as that individual's billing and medical records.

If a patient ends up returning to the hospital with a health complaint linked to that procedure, the attending physician can look up detailed records regarding the implant in the Lumedx software, which contains a record of each device used for that patient, as well as the exact location in which it was implanted in the body—down to the exact artery, for instance, in which a stent was placed. "That information is vital to the overall care of the patient," Braga says.

According to Braga, the combined WaveMark-Lumedx system generates a range of reports based on inventory usage, as well as patient procedures and billing. The reports, he explains, generate much more information than he and his staff previously had access to. "We got so much information, it was overwhelming," he states. "I had to tell the people in meetings to turn the reports over [and stop reading them]."

Although Florida Hospital had already been using Lumedx software prior to testing WaveMark's solution, Braga deems the combined WaveMark-Lumedx system a great improvement over his hospital's older inventory-tracking process, which involves manually scanning bar codes on device packaging in order to enter them into and out of inventory. Because it is a manual process, bar-code scanning is subject to human error and can not account for when employees failed to follow established procedures. What's more, because the RFID interrogators take readings of the tags within each cabinet up to 72 times each day, Braga says he feels more confident about the timeliness of the inventory data.

"We feel more confident in the accuracy of these reports with WaveMark [versus bar-code-based reporting] because it tracks the [life] cycle," he says. When a tagged device is pulled from a WaveMark cabinet, the system expects to then see the tag read again, along with an associated Lumedx event ID, when it is used in a procedure. If this does not occur, the WaveMark software sends e-mail alerts to Braga. "You can't sweep things under the rug," he says.