Clinical engineering
Advancing tracking in UK hospitals
At EBME 2025, a key topic of discussion was the need to track and manage medical technologies and patients in healthcare environments. Effective tracking could save the NHS vast sums of money at a time when finances are constrained, improve the management of patient flow and, most importantly, enhance patient safety.
At EBME 2025, Dr. Sabesan Sithamparanathan OBE pointed out, real-time tracking has the potential to revolutionise healthcare. With over 15 years’ experience in the IoT space, the multi- award-winning entrepreneur founded PervasID, a Cambridge University spin-out company deploying radio-frequency identification (RFID) solutions. The technology is being used in NHS hospitals for the tracking of surgical instruments, to enhance decontamination processes, as well as tracking hospital assets, to ensure mission critical medical devices are available “at the right place and the right time”. “Technology will take us down a different path in the next five to 10 years,” he commented. “AI, the Internet of Things (IOT) and quantum computing will bring significant change.” An important challenge facing healthcare is managing the increasing plethora of medical devices and technologies – visibility of these assets is vital for accurate inventory, effective servicing and patient safety. When vital medical devices go missing, staff are also having to use valuable time to search for missing products instead of focusing on patient care. This results in disrupted procedures, employee frustration and increased costs. Asset tracking has the potential to save billions of pounds for hospitals, while waiting times can be reduced and quality of care improved through better asset management.
“In a typical 500-600 bed hospital, there are
around 20,000-30,000 medical devices. Based on studies of a typical hospital, 30% of the devices are untraceable. That accounts for around one million pounds per year, per hospital – and, in the UK, we have around 500 hospitals!” he exclaimed. “This is a hundred-billion-dollar
problem that we are trying to solve across the world.” The tracking of surgical instruments through the decontamination process is also an important area for patient safety, as Dr. Sabesan Sithamparanathan explained: “There is no 100% guarantee that every single surgical instrument is going through the proper decontamination process, because we are human. “By tracking every surgical instrument on
trays, we could achieve very close to 100% accuracy, ensuring that every single surgical instrument from the operating theatre goes through the decontaminating process, before they are reused. “Tracking can also help ensure that instruments are not left inside the patient
Based on studies of a typical hospital, 30% of the devices are untraceable. That accounts for around one million pounds per year, per hospital – and, in the UK, we have around 500 hospitals!
during the operation. We can even track patients,” he commented. The conventional way of solving this has been the use of barcode technology, but it is a manual technology. An advantage of RFID is that it enables real-time, remote tracking, and doesn’t require line of sight scanning. “In a supermarket, you have to scan each item
one by one. But with RFID technology, you could put 100 items in a basket, and it could scan all the 100 items in less than one second. With so- called ‘passive RFID’, you could attach this tag to every single asset in a hospital and achieve that accuracy. But the challenge has been making that work in the real world… At Cambridge University, we have solved the problem of ‘dead spots’,” he commented, likening this to the gaps in coverage experienced with a mobile phone signal.
He explained that there are two types of
RFID technology. Passive RFID uses a simple tag that requires no local power source or maintenance and is low in cost, but the disadvantages include the short range in
November 2025 I
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