21ST-CENTURY TECHNOLOGY
wide-area ceiling tile reader within its Clinical Engineering department. The aim is to use the technology to help manage patient flow, support theatre management, and improve the patient discharge process to make beds available more quickly.
The entrance to the Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert, Scotland.
Harland Simon said: “Historically, fixed passive readers have been expensive and not delivered the required read rates. Integrated with the Trust’s RFiD Discovery system, PervasID’s new Space Ranger reader is, however, set to deliver a detection rate of over 99%, and features eight antenna ports. Four antennae have been installed in the corners of the read area, with the other four in the centre. The reader captures tags within about an 11 x 7 x 2.5 m area. In the trials, items with passive GS1-compliant UHF RFID tags attached to them are moved through the room in which the readers have been mounted, and the results measured.”
While operating theatres can be ‘one of the most expensive areas of a hospital’, if run efficiently, Essentia believes they can be ‘very profitable’.
RFID from Harland Simon At the Lord Carter Awards at Hospital Innovations 2017, the Runner-up Award went to Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH), for its successful use of an RFiD Discovery system from Harland Simon; in 2015 the Trust became the UK’s first to introduce GS1 standards to manage mobile medical equipment. The Department of Health’s eProcurement strategy mandates the use of GS1 standards in every English acute Trust. When it chose to implement GS1- compliant labelling, CUH had already experienced ‘huge benefits’ from tracking 7,500 mobile devices with an active RFiD Discovery system at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. To enable CUH’s wards, departments, and Clinical Engineering team to track the locations of all the Trust’s medical assets, all assets were subsequently fitted with passive RFID asset tags. To date, 37,500 units have been tagged with GS1-compliant passive RFID tags. These replaced existing asset labels, carry a Global Individual Asset Identifier, and are encoded with a unique ID linked to a particular asset. Around 20 per cent of assets continue to be also tracked with active RFID.
Specially designed trolley CUH’s Clinical Engineering team uses two types of passive RFID readers, which capture data from the tags and send
The new PervasID reader allows NHS Forth Valley to automatically see if any of its 10,000 passively tagged devices are in the workshop.
location information to a central database. A specially designed trolley incorporating a UHF RFID reader and three antennae performs equipment searches as it is pushed around the hospital. The reader records the date, time, and location when it detects a passive tag, while a small mobile handheld reader is used to audit wards or locate specific equipment. The central RFiD Discovery database has been integrated with the Trust’s e-Quip asset management system, which records all medical device assets, allowing clinical engineering and clinical staff to ‘see’ the location of any RFID-tagged medical device.
RFID implementation has also ‘put the Trust firmly on the route to scanning for safety’, with equipment able to be scanned against a patient’s wristband to identify which device is used for the individual. Other benefits include more accurate, faster, and more efficient, auditing of all medical devices, and improved risk management and regulatory compliance – ‘by minimising the circulation of potentially dangerous, unsuitable, or insufficiently maintained, equipment’.
Pioneering new passive wide-area reader technology To expand its capability to read passive tags, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is now trialling a new
Reduced capital expenditure The Trust said in summer 2017 it had so far reduced its capital expenditure for new devices by over £400,000 by improving utilisation levels for existing equipment, and forecast a cost saving on ad-hoc hiring of specialist equipment of £300,000 for 2016/2017. Elimination of time wasted searching for devices had improved its Clinical Engineering team’s efficiency, and seen clinical staff’s time better utilised, while ward audit time had been reduced from 4-6 hours to just 10 minutes, allowing more frequent equipment auditing, and increasing data accuracy from 65% to over 90%. Additionally, 98% of items are now delivered from the Trust’s Medical Equipment Library within 30 minutes. RFID asset tracking is already being used by the Trust for many ‘assets’, such as when moving and handling wheelchairs, tablets, and communication aids, and will be extended to include items ranging from computers to microwaves. CUH also plans introducing Global Location Numbers (GLNs) to identify each location within the hospital, and to use the system for other departments as part of its wider GS1 implementation.
Cost avoidance
Another RFID ‘pioneer’ in healthcare is NHS Forth Valley in Scotland, which recently completed a successful pilot to test the read rates of the PervasID Space Ranger 9200 RFID wide-area reader at its Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert, Scotland. The new UHF passive RFID reader was installed in the hospital’s Medical Physics workshop, where 108 passive RFID-tagged devices were scanned into the test location with a handheld scanner. Individual devices were then removed and subsequently brought back in. During this process location data
June 2018 Health Estate Journal 35
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