RFID, Savior of the Economy

Part 1 - Clinical Inventory Management System

In case you have been living under a rock for the past couple of months, I am going to whisper 3 words to you which strike fear throughout the nation: double dip recession.

As wall street, politicians, and Stephen Colbert all lose their heads, I want to share with you a possible stepping stone which could begin to bring our nation out of it.

That stepping stone is RFID in Healthcare.

Now I know some of you just rolled your eyes saying you’ve heard it all before, but please take a moment to follow my train of logic here. 

The healthcare industry of the United States is not at the state it should be. We are one of the most well-developed countries in the world, and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are wasted per hospital on expired products, poor labor management, and hospital acquired infections. If we can lower costs for these hospitals, we lower:

• Cost of patient care

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• Cost of insurance premiums
• Cost of taxes paid to support those on public assistance, particularly Medicaid and Medicare.

Do you think this could help improve the state of our nation and YOUR life?

So how do we do this?

First, Hospitals need to start implementing RFID clinical inventory management systems. There are many reasons to do so (see graphic below), however, I will be focusing on two. Reducing expired inventory costs, and poor labor management.

Products expire on hospital inventory shelves constantly. Doctors and nurses as well as hospital administration are simply not aware of the upcoming product expirations. As such, thousands of dollars worth of product simply expire, providing no service to anyone. Recently one of my colleagues visited a hospital surgery room and found three $2,000 stents sitting on the shelf, expired. She wasn’t even looking for them.

With an RFID clinical inventory management system, users are given warnings about upcoming product expirations. This allows hospital staff to take the necessary steps in order to use that inventory first. In addition, consignment inventory can be exchanged by hospital staff before it expires, saving the hospital even more money. Also, expired products will not be used in patients which reduces costly lawsuits (which are the driving force of insurance and healthcare costs).

The second reason to introduce a RFID surgical inventory system is that it saves labor by bridging the gap between the EMR (Emergency Medical Record) system and the hospital supply chain software. Currently, prior to surgery, nurses have to search for a product, find it, manually record the cost of the item, then move on to the next item.

Does this sound like a 21^st century system? With an RFID clinical inventory management system, a nurse can easily find the needed items (the software knows where each item is located down to the cabinet) and scan them all at one time. This immediately assigns all of those costs to the patient as well as auto-calculating the sum.

There is no more hunting and searching for different products or manually calculating the total sum which may or may not be correctly assigned to the patient. This process could save the hospitals labor expenses as well as letting nurses focus on enhancing the customer experience.

(This post is continued in Part 2: Hand Hygiene Compliance Systems)

Many thanks to David Siqueira for the photo