- Centro Hospitalar de Entre Douro e Vouga has deployed a management system from Polytex that provides a view into the access, use and return of its textiles with UHF RFID cabinets, antennas and handheld readers.
- Polytex has now released the latest version of its solution to manage data about each textile item through its lifecycle.
A hospital in northern Portugal has deployed a solution that brings control over its entire linen and uniform management—from its internal laundry, to use by staff in each department, and their return when they are dirty.
With the RFID system from Polytex, Centro Hospitalar de Entre Douro e Vouga has been able to reduce laundering by 15 percent, and has reduced the need ordering new products by more than half. The results, said Miguel Paiva, the Santa Maria hospital’s board of directors chairman, mean a return on investment of less than two years, as well as a transition to a more sustainable operation.
Centro Hospitalar operates several primary care facilities within Portugal’s national health system that combined have 450 hospital beds as well as an ER, surgical suites and medical offices.
Uniform Management
Similarly to most hospitals, Centro Hospitalar has a complex inventory of linens and garments that are used, laundered and reused for patient care. Unlike most of the healthcare facilities in the country, it owns these textiles, and operates an internal laundry to ensure they are laundered, folded and quickly made available for re-use.
Over the years a lack of tight control over the inventory meant laundry services were growing inefficient, and assets were being lost and reordered at a high volume. The hospital brought in a lean management company to boost productivity in the laundry, but it still needed to improve control over the assets flowing through the hospital and laundry, Paiva recalled.
“We had a lot of losses every year, we were buying more and more flat linen and more and more [uniforms] for the staff,” he said.
Pioneering RFID in Portuguese Hospitals
The hospital was aware of one issue: some staff members were stockpiling uniforms in their lockers to ensure they never ran out. However, management didn’t know the volume of assets that were in fact being kept out of the inventory pool because of this behavior.
To gain a view into the supply chain, and learn where and how the assets were being used, the hospital chose to use RFID technology to uniquely track each item, from bed sheets and pillow cases to employee shirts and pants in all sizes, even head caps. RFID wasn’t used by other Portuguese national health service hospitals, so the hospital took the role of pioneer, selecting the Polytex uniform management solution, with RFID enabled cabinets and smart dispensers for uniforms and linens, and RFID tags in each staff garment.
The deployment took place in phases. With the first phase, Centro Hospitalar applied passive UHF RFID tags to all garments, each encoded with a unique ID lined to that item in the Polytex Total Care Manager software. They deployed dispenser machines for the garments for the staff—first in the surgery department.
Controlling Uniform Distribution
As each employee picks up a clean uniform at the beginning of their shift, they are uniquely identified with a fingerprint reader. The machine then dispenses the appropriate items, in their size—clean and folded—with a robotic arm in a process that takes less than six seconds. That item is then linked to that individual.
When they complete their shift, hospital staff return the uniform items in a designated unit, and the tags are read, updating the system to indicate they have been returned. If the individual does not return the uniform, they cannot checkout another clean set of garments.
The second step included deploying uniform dispensers in two small hospitals within their healthcare system.
The hospital is now expanding into other parts of its central hospital beyond the surgical department. Today there are dispensers and readers deployed around the facility to identify not only uniforms but sheets or other flat linens as they are moved from one department to another.
Cart readers are used to read the tags of soiled items entering the laundry, and for redistribution of clean items to specific departments. Doorway fixed reader antennas can monitor the hospital exits to identify assets leaving the premises.
Reducing Laundry Volumes
When it came to linens, departments were instructed to request a specific number of linens needed for their operations per week. Those assets were delivered to each department, and once used, clean assets replaced them. As the linens move to and from the departments, the tags are read.
The hospital found discrepancies between the number of linens used and laundered, and the linens actually needed for patient care. The result of this practice was excess laundering. In some cases, departments used more linens than needed, and investigation found that staff were using them inappropriately, such as deploying a clean bed sheet to wipe a spill or scrub the floor.
With the RFID system, management was able to make departments accountable for excess use of linens and educate staff on proper use of these assets, said Paiva. As a result, the laundry being process with controls based on the RFID data was reduced by two tons it to 16 tons a week.
Preventing Excess Purchasing
The hospital uses the technology to track when items leave the facility, such as in an ambulance. RFID antennas installed at doorways and elevators capture the movement of specific linens and a record is created so that the hospital can ensure it is returned.
When it comes to uniform supplies, the system identified the hoarding behavior of staff. In fact, they found with the help of RFID, a case in which a single employee was hoarding 50 uniforms in his locker.
By preventing this, the hospital was able to reduce the amount of new clothes purchased for the healthcare providers. “We were buying every year about €150,000 ($166,000 USD) of garments and we reduce it this to less than half of that amount,” Paiva said.
Now, new garments are being purchased to replace worn items, rather than missing ones.
Polytex Expands its Offerings
Polytex has offered its RFID solution for textile management to industrial sites, hospitals and hotels. The Cloud Total Care Manager solution collects data from all readers and generates real-time reports for hospital management, which they can use to make data-driven decisions.
Recently, it released its latest version— the end-to-end management that can reside in the cloud, and integrate with the user’s own management system—known as the Textile Full-Cycle Management Solution, said Matan Aviram, Polytex’ product manager,
In that way, its customers can track goods both in cabinets that are equipped with RFID readers, and throughout a facility with RFID readers and antennas that can be fixed at key locations, as well as handheld readers for portable inventory counts.
Textile Full-Cycle Management Solution
Polytex designs and manufactures the RFID-enabled products including cabinets, desktop or countertop readers, and portal readers. Dispensing machines can accommodate an average of 600 items with the D200 model, or 1,200 with the D300; whether folded to hanging garments. Additionally, customers can use a Polytex app to display data on mobile devices, in real time, synchronized with Polytex’ cloud-based, or on-premises software. Hanging items are stored another smart cabinet.
Polytex offers manufacturing in Israel as well as in Europe and the U.S., for global deployments. They ca provide RFID tagging if needed.
For Centro Hospitalar, the facility’s management has tightened its control over textile processes. “Now, if we have problems, we know that we have problems. We have a very fine definition of where the problems are and we can find strategies to implement solutions,” Paiva said.
Based on the 15 percent cut in laundering, and reduced ordering requirements, the hospital expects a return on investment in about two years or less.
Changing Behavior
“The biggest learning we take from this is that the staff react according to the signals we give them,” Paiva said. “If we give them a signal that we don’t control linens, they act as if they can do whatever they want.”
With a system in place that offers transparency, in a fair way, he added, the staff members are complying with the new requirements. “Everybody understands that we are using public money so we have to offer value for money we spend,” explained Paiva.
Additionally, he expects the technology to support the hospital’s sustainability strategy by reducing water and detergents needed for excess laundering.
As the company completes expansion of its central hospital it will also complete the roll-out of uniform dispensers, and portal readers by the first half of 2025, Paiva said, in intensive care and emergency room units.