As hospitals in the U.S. become larger and have to serve more patients, ensuring that inventory counts for medicines to are up to date and accurate has become a priority.
This was an issue that Texas Children’s Hospital was having as its pharmacy was struggling with a lack of real-time inventory visibility, leading to several critical issues. An annual inventory review revealed $40 million in medications that could not be properly tracked, representing 8-10% of their drug budget.
As a result, pharmacy technicians spent hours manually counting items and reconciling reports, which often had discrepancies. And ordering was based on “gut feeling,” resulting in overstocking, expired medications, and supply gaps.
Texas Children’s Hospital
Texas Children’s Hospital is a not-for-profit healthcare organization with a mission to create a healthier future for children and women globally through leadership in patient care, education, and research.
As one of the nation’s largest and most comprehensive pediatric and women’s health care organizations that consistently ranked among the top children’s hospitals in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, it manages nearly 4.9 million patient encounters annually and is the primary pediatric training site for Baylor College of Medicine.
RFID Hardware
To solve their pharmaceutical inventory issue, they worked in collaboration with Zebra Technologies and Tecsys to co-engineer an RFID-powered solution. Zebra is a global leader in digitizing and automating workflows to deliver intelligent operations. Organizations globally across retail, manufacturing, transportation, logistics, healthcare, and other industries rely on the company to deliver outcomes today while driving innovation for what’s next. Together with their partners, they create new ways of working that improve productivity and empower organizations to be better every day.
The key components of the Texas Children’s Hospital solution include ZD621R Premium Desktop RFID Printers to create RFID labels for medications valued over $250, DS9908R 1D/2D Hybrid Scanners to quickly scan medication barcodes, which then triggers the printing of an RFID label. Ahd HC50 Series Mobile Computers paired with RFD40 UHF RFID Sleds to instantly locate tagged medications on the shelves.
Implementation Benefits
The implementation of this RFID solution has led to dramatic improvements in the pharmacy’s operations including medication tagging time was reduced to just 7 seconds from 2 minutes per item and the pharmacy department achieving 99.99% accuracy in cabinet inventory. Other noted improvements included:
- In one year, the hospital saved $14 million on clotting factor medications by being able to detect expiring medication and prevent loss.
- The solution has provided visibility into $40 million of previously untracked inventory.
- Technicians can now instantly capture every tagged medication by simply waving the RFD40 sled, a process that used to take hours of manual scanning.
This successful collaboration has not only improved efficiency and reduced costs for Texas Children’s Hospital but has also enhanced patient care by ensuring that critical medications are always available when needed, said hospital officials.
“One quick scan tells us if we’re about to run out of any critical medication,” said Jeffrey Wagner, Vice President of Pharmacy, Respiratory Care, & ECMO Services, Texas Children’s Hospital. “Before, we only found out after medications expired. Now we can redistribute medications or adjust orders before shortages impact patients.”