New York Medical Center Tracks OR Equipment for Trauma Care

The department has employed a clinical engineer to manage the inspection and maintenance of hospital equipment, and tagging has been made part of this process. Thus far, the hospital is attaching tags to 3,000 assets, according to Joel Cook, AeroScout's marketing director for health-care solutions. SUNY's Central Equipment Services department, responsible for locating items as well as cleaning and maintaining them, is tagging equipment as it arrives in that area for servicing. The hospital is continuing to tag items as they are serviced.

In addition, the facility has installed a temperature-monitoring system in approximately 100 refrigerators that store pharmaceuticals, vaccines and bone and tissue samples. Before installing the AeroScout system in the refrigerators, nursing and pharmacy workers were tasked with manually tracking temperatures in the refrigerators several times each day, then recording those measurements on paper. The system was slow and had the potential for errors.

With the AeroScout system, Wi-Fi tags attached to refrigerators transmit temperature data at pre-set intervals. This information, as well as the date and time, is transmitted along with the unique ID number of the tag within the refrigeration unit. The MobileView software associates the temperature data with a specific refrigerator.

The hospital can record data regarding refrigerator health, as well receive alerts if the temperature reaches an unacceptable level, which could put any temperature-sensitive contents at risk.

Have the temperature-sensing and asset-tracking systems delivered a return on investment? "We are saving a little bit of time for a lot of people," Zeman says. "We know that the staff now has more time to focus on other areas of their jobs, such as direct patient care." With greater productivity, equipment utilization and OR throughput, Zeman anticipates a payback period of less than a year.