Florida health-care company Health First is employing a real-time location system (RTLS) to do more than just track its 1,200 infusion pumps, as well as specialty assets such as bariatric beds. The firm is using the system, provided by AeroScout, to monitor the temperatures of coolers at three of its facilities, in order to determine whether pumps are on or off, as well as to monitor their movement through the cleaning and maintenance process.
If an infusion pump passes from a hospital room to the cleaning area’s entrance, the system determines that the pump will soon be cleaned and prepared for reuse. If it then leaves that location and is moved, for example, to another patient room without first being cleaned, an alarm is triggered, indicating that the pump was not properly processed. The system is also designed to determine whether a pump is currently in use. That allows management to measure the pump’s utilization rate, as well as know which pumps are being used at any given time, thereby sparing health-care workers from having to search for a pump that turns out to already be in use.
The company installed the system at its Brevard County facilities—Cape Canaveral Hospital, Holmes Regional Medical Center and Palm Bay Hospital—approximately two years ago. It is now in the process of building a fourth medical center, Viera Hospital, which is slated to open in 2011. That facility will utilize the system as well.
Due to the savings achieved from understanding where pumps are located (and from increasing their utilization rate) via the RTLS information, the company does not expect to need to purchase additional pumps for the new facility. Each pump costs about $3,000, and Vieira Hospital would require 100 to 120 pumps. Therefore, AeroScout estimates, Health First should save at least $300,000. Health First has declined to be interviewed for this article.
Health First attaches AeroScout active tags to some of its high-value assets. The tags transmit their ID numbers to the existing Wi-Fi access points throughout the three facilities. In the case of the infusion pumps, AeroScout’s T2 tags are attached to a cable extending from each pump’s serial-interface port. The tag queries the port to determine whether the pump is on or off, and then transmits that information, along with its own unique ID, at 2.4 GHz to the Wi-Fi access point in nearest proximity.
“Knowing the location of pumps is great, but knowing if it’s in use is even better,” says Joel Cook, AeroScout’s health-care solutions director. In the future, he notes, Health First may opt to use pumps with built-in Wi-Fi access, but the AeroScout tags would still be used to provide location data when the pumps are powered off.
AeroScout’s MobileView asset-tracking and -management software captures each pump’s ID number, location and status (whether it is on or off), and then stores that information, making it available to be viewed in real time by managers or staff members seeking a particular pump. The MobileView software also follows the pump’s path, determining which process it is undergoing based on its location, and issuing an alert if the expected maintenance path is not followed.
If a pump leaves a patient room, for instance, it could then be moved into a holding area for the cleaning room, then into the sterile processing area, then to a clean holding area and on to another patient room. If it flows in a way that fails to meet expectations, MobileView sends an alert via e-mail or text message to members of the hospital’s biomedical department. This alert is critical to the hospital, Cook says, since these types of errors—especially if they occur during shift changes—could have serious health repercussions for patients.
“The alert is great for efficiency and for patient safety,” Cook states. It ensures items don’t need to go through the cleaning process twice because they didn’t flow properly the first time, and it could save a patient from receiving treatment from soiled equipment.
Approximately 18 months ago, the hospital installed the system’s temperature-monitoring function for its coolers at all three hospitals. Each refrigerator is equipped with an AeroScout temperature-monitoring tag with a temperature sensor. After some discussion between Health First and AeroScout, it was decided that rather than having the temperature tags beacon at a rate of every 12 hours (the frequency at which the refrigerators had been checked manually prior to the system’s deployment), they would be set to beacon every five minutes. If several readings outside of the acceptable temperature threshold are received, the system issues an alert.
More frequent beaconing means management can now be alerted to the problem within 10 or 15 minutes after the temperature of a particular refrigerator began to rise—either because it was faulty, or due to someone leaving the door open. That faster response time could save the hospital the cost of replacing the refrigerated contents, AeroScout indicates.
“If the refrigerator door was open a few hours, everything in it could be lost,” Cook explains. “That microscopic visibility catches problems while they can still be addressed,” says Steffan Haithcox, AeroScout’s senior director of marketing.
To date, Health First has installed 2,500 tags to assets at the three hospitals. It now has tags on 170 refrigerator and freezer units. Since the initial installation, two years ago, the time workers spend searching for a missing infusion pump has dropped from an average of 30 minutes to just a few minutes, Haithcox says. The company is now working to improve the pumps’ utilization rate, which was determined to be about 35 percent. It hopes to bring the rate up to almost twice that number, by using data from the RTLS to identify which pumps are rarely used, or where there may be delays in the cleaning process.