Managing Lifesaving Hospital Crash Carts Becomes Easier with RFID

Imagine: A loved one experiencing a life-threatening episode is rushed to the emergency room. A trauma team receives them, checking their pulse, airway, and breathing while a nurse rolls a crash cart toward the gurney.

This cart contains lifesaving medication and equipment. As familiar as a stethoscope, the crash cart is nothing less than a critical extension of the trauma team. For everyone’s sake, it must be fully stocked with the correct medications— and if it isn’t, there could be life-threatening consequences.

Similar carts, containing trays of medications and supplies, need to be fully stocked in the OR, OB, pediatrics, and other acute care areas.

RFID Emergence in Healthcare

But kit restocking can be a burdensome, error-prone task that takes time away from patient care. Fortunately, RFID technology enables hospitals to improve kit completeness, accuracy, and efficiency. A typical hospital stands to save hours every week and eliminate mistakes by upgrading from outdated barcode systems.

One hospital on the vanguard of RFID adoption documented its gains by measuring time-and-motion costs before and after a recent changeover from barcodes to RFID. The pharmacy team at Huntington Health of Pasadena, CA, reduced its kit-and-tray management time by 70%— or more than 2.5 hours a week. That’s 130 pharmacist and technician hours saved per year.

Barcode Barriers

This 600-bed nonprofit hospital, a level II trauma center and affiliate of Cedars Sinai, operates the largest emergency department in the San Gabriel Valley. The institution stocks more than 250 crash cart trays and ancillary kits for emergency use.

Until recently, the hospital used a large overhead barcode scanner for replenishing kits and trays after use. In theory, barcode scanning could identify every item in a crash cart tray, checking for missing, expired, or near-expiration medications with one digital glance. The idea was for technicians to scan a recently used tray, restock it according to software prompts, rescan it to confirm completeness, have a pharmacist verify the tray was complete, and dispatch it to appropriate locations throughout the hospital.

As many users discovered however, barcode scanning doesn’t always work that way in practice. The process can be far more time-consuming. The scanner’s computer-vision technology requires each barcode in a tray to face upward for detection by the sensor. At Huntington, that meant technicians had to manually rearrange each unit of medication in the tray before scanning. And overhead scanning, which requires a clear line of sight, simply didn’t work with tackle-box-style lidded kits.

Recognizing that barcode scanning was often more trouble than it was worth, technicians devised time-consuming workarounds, including scanning tray items one by one with a handheld scanner. Technicians tagged about 200 items and replenished 26 trays per week this way, most often for crash carts. The process of tagging, scanning, and restocking (including pharmacist check times) took 3 hours 45 minutes per week.

A New Way Forward

More hospitals are now discovering what Huntington Health did— that RFID provides greater efficiency, accuracy, and scalability. RFID not only saves staff time, but standardizes workflows across all kits and trays, not just crash cart trays.

The ability to read multiple tagged items simultaneously, using radio waves that don’t require a clear line of sight, eliminates the need to manually reposition each medication. RFID also enables the hospital to standardize replenishment workflows across open trays and enclosed kits, as well as in both the OR and labor & delivery units.

With RFID, drugs are either ordered with RFID tag inlays or tags arrive in rolls that can be quickly applied to units of medication. After tagging, the next step in the RFID workflow is similar to the ideal barcode workflow. The difference is that RFID works as promised. After 90 days of using RFID for crash cart trays and ancillary kits, tagging, restocking, and checking accuracy consumed 1 hour and 11 minutes per week. That’s a time savings of 2 hours, 33 minutes, 32 seconds per week, or 130 staff hours annually.

“RFID enables true automation,” Huntington Health’s Tu Tran, PharmD, wrote in a case report. “RFID automates the workflow, providing 100% accurate readings and significantly reducing opportunities for error.”

The Big Picture

Use cases like this are being replicated across the country and around the world, and the benefits are even larger for hospitals upgrading from purely manual processes. In healthcare specifically, RFID has benefits beyond simple efficiency gains. The technology drives improvements in inventory management, waste reduction, and the handling of medication shortages and recalls through real-time quantity, location, and usage monitoring.

The technology’s ability to improve a manual, labor-intensive process is helping drive progress in the healthcare market, which is projected to grow at a CAGR of 16.95% from 2024 to 2030. With healthcare costs soaring and staff workloads increasing, any savings or efficiencies in the system are paramount.

In 2026, look for RFID to deliver quantifiable gains in these areas, equipping acute care teams to successfully treat your loved one.