Aug 11, 2010A 500-bed hospital in southeast, Ga., was looking for a better way to track the location and utilization of mobile hospital equipment, so it fired the contractor it had been using and brought the job in-house. Now, with a radio frequency identification-based real-time location system (RTLS), it is managing assets more effectively and at a lower cost.
"When I first came here in November 2004, we really didn't have a good idea of what was going on with our assets," says Al Hardy, the agent for capital purchasing and asset management at the hospital, which requested its name not be revealed. "We were unable to track their location, the cost of maintenance and utilization rates. The cost of equipment resulted in the hospital taking on debt, and we just needed to get to a better place."
Hardy had known about RFID from his days in the military. He was the equivalent of a clinical engineer for a U.S. Army hospital, and while visiting a warehouse for the hospital, he noticed an RFID system that had yet to be installed. He offered to deploy it for the hospital, but the project never went forward.
Still, he remained interested in RFID, and when he joined the Georgia hospital, he began exploring the possibility of installing new enterprise asset management software along with an RFID system. The big question was how to pay for it. With the Georgia hospital already struggling with debt, there was no money for an additional capital expenditure.
Hardy and other members of the asset-management team began looking at whether it would be cheaper to take the job in-house using an RFID system, than continuing to use an outside contractor. When they priced the RFID system, they discovered it would indeed be cheaper, even when they accounted for the additional people they would need to hire to replace the contracted workers.
The next step was researching which system to use. The team read articles and then sat down with some of the main vendors of RTLSs for hospitals. During calls to other hospitals given as references, team members heard that each system did the job, but each had its own problems or idiosyncrasies. "It came down to two main issues," Hardy says. "Which companies best understood what we wanted to do, and which were within our price points."
In the end, the choice was between a system that featured 900 MHz active RFID tags and one that featured ZigBee-based 2.4 GHz active tags. The team elected to adopt the 900 MHz system through a managed-services contract (Hardy declines to name the vendor) because it met the hospital's requirements and offered the return on investment the hospital was looking for.
The system went live in May. It covers about 75 percent of the hospital's 1 million square feet. In the past, the hospital would have paid a contractor to locate assets and bring them to the hospital unit coordinator who requested those items, who delivers them to the patients' rooms. Today, it uses in-house staff in the materials-management department to locate the devices and bring them to the unit coordinator.
Staff can view a map of the hospital or an individual unit on the hospital intranet. The system allows them to type in an asset number to locate an asset in the areas of the hospital covered by the RTLS. They can also look at what equipment is in a certain unit, or filter by types of assets. Hardy estimates that the hospital is saving about $400,000 a year by managing assets internally, rather than paying the contractor.
The system has not been without some issues. When first installed, it was sometimes unclear which floor an asset was on. The vendor made adjustments to the system to rectify that problem. Another issue has been locating assets in an area that was formerly used for taking X-rays and consequently has lead-lined walls that interfere with the RFID equipment's RF transmissions.
The hospital is considering expanding the system to cover other areas of the hospital, such as a research lab, not currently covered by the RTLS system, and tagging additional types of assets. The team has come up with several criteria for which types of equipment to tag, such as cost, which departments use the equipment and whether better management can increase patient throughput. Hardy is in the process of validating the criteria before the decision is made to tag additional assets. The hospital is also considering training nurses to use the system, so they can also locate assets for themselves, but the big benefit has been getting a handle on the location, utilization and maintenance costs of all its mobile equipment.
"We use capital contracts to pay for the equipment," says Hardy. "Now, before we replace equipment or purchase additional equipment, we can use the RTLS to determine the utilization rate, how much time the equipment spent being repaired, whether one department is underutilizing that equipment and other things to determine whether we really need to spend that money."
