The solution, provided by Vizzia Technology, includes CenTrak’s real-time location system to track equipment, as well as L-Com’s Point Six Wi-Fi sensors to wirelessly measure and report refrigerator and freezer temperatures, in order to reduce spoilage.
By Claire Swedberg – RFID Journal
Oct 05, 2016— Piedmont Healthcare, one of Georgia’s largest health-care systems, is expanding its use of a real-time location system (RTLS) that it first installed at its Atlanta hospital five years ago, to track the locations of its assets in real time. The company has since deployed the solution at Piedmont Henry Hospital, in Stockbridge, Piedmont Fayette Hospital, in Fayetteville, Piedmont Mountainside Hospital, in Jasper, and Piedmont Newnan Hospital, in Newnan. Next year, the firm plans to take the RTLS live at Piedmont Newton Hospital, in Covington.
This year, Piedmont Healthcare began using the RTLS for its specialty bed rental operation, newly launched to share its beds among its hospitals, thereby saving it the rental fees it previously paid to outside companies. The solution consists of CenTrak tags and access points (devices used to receive the tags’ RF transmissions), as well as Vizzia Technologies‘ software platform, residing on the hospital’s server.
Piedmont Atlanta is the largest and most complex of the six hospitals that the company currently owns. The facility had processes in place to manage equipment used by nurses, says Steven Kelley, Piedmont’s manager of diagnostic imaging repair and biomedical engineering, but still found that the items were not always available when the biomed department or nurses needed them. Each of approximately 25 nurse stations has clean and dirty rooms in which movable medical equipment (MMEs), such as pumps and respiratory equipment, should be stored. In the dirty room, the items awaited cleaning, while in the clean room they were ready for patient use. Because equipment could not always be located, the company sought a solution from Vizzia, which provided an EPC Gen 2 ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID system in 2006.
With the UHF RFID deployment, Vizzia affixed passive EPC Gen 2 tags above doorways, as well as to equipment. The unique ID number encoded to each tag was linked to the corresponding item’s serial number and description, while the tag above each door was linked to that room or location. Workers then used Zebra Technologies MC90xx series handheld readers to access data regarding equipment, as well as to read tags and update location information. For instance, employees read the tag above the doorway to a particular room, such as the cleaning area, then the tag of each piece of equipment being put into that room.
On a daily basis, says Andrew Halasz, Vizzia’s president and CEO, Piedmont or Vizzia team members would make MME deliveries and pickups. When doing so, they would take their handheld readers with them to continuously update the inventory data.
In 2011, the hospital transitioned to an RTLS solution that replaced the UHF RFID system. “The reason behind that was to further refine asset-management processes and track more active items, like wheelchairs and gurneys,” Halasz states, “while also enabling future process improvement initiatives, like staff workflow enhancement.”
Although the RFID system was helping the hospital to monitor MMEs as they moved through the cleaning process and as they awaited reuse, Kelley says, the solution could not track anything outside of those designated and tagged areas. “The passive RFIDsystem showed the last known location” of a piece of equipment, he explains, but the hospital wanted greater visibility.
So in 2011, Vizzia installed a CenTrak RTLS solution throughout Piedmont Atlanta Hospital. CenTrak tags were attached to wheelchairs, gurneys, beds and MMEs. Each tag receives the ID numbers transmitted by infrared (IR) beacons within its range, then forwards that information, along with its own identifier, to a CenTrak access point, via a 900 MHz RF signal.
“I can see when and where items aren’t going back into the soiled room,” Kelley says. “I can see if there are five pumps in one room.” The software also detects if a protocol is not being followed. For example, if a piece of equipment is used on a patient, then is moved to another patient’s room without first undergoing the proper cleaning procedure, the system will display that event.
In addition, Kelley says, in the event that a device is recalled, not only can he use the system to identify where that item is located in real time (so that it can be retrieved), but he can also view historical data regarding where the device has been, such as in which patient rooms. That information can then be compared against the medical record system, thus indicating which patient may have been in contact with that device.
Now that the system is being installed at all of Piedmont’s facilities, Kelley says, hospital management can remotely view the inventory of its assets at all of the hospitals, and can identify if something needs to be moved, such as a particular specialty bed that has been transported to one hospital but needs to be returned to another. Piedmont is now renting its beds out to its own hospitals, enabling them to avoid paying excessive rental fees to third-party companies. Kelley expects Piedmont’s bed-rental service will save the company money. The technology reduces the amount of labor time that personnel need to spend walking the floors searching for missing items and also decreases the need to purchase extra items if a particular specialty bed cannot be located.
During the past year, Vizzia also installed Point Six wireless Wi-Fi temperature sensors from L-Com in the Atlanta hospital’s coolers for storing medications and vaccines. The shortcomings of tracking temperatures manually, Kelley notes, included not only the cost of labor required to perform these manual checks, but also the acquisition of incomplete data. Typically, busy refrigerators are opened and closed multiple times throughout a given day, and some coolers may struggle to resume their optimum temperature once the doors have been opened. For that reason, employees often collect temperature information during quiet times, such as late at night. However, those late-night data collections do not always provide a clear picture of what temperature levels have been throughout an entire day, and that lack of information can be hazardous to vaccines and other temperature-sensitive products.
With the RFID system, using Point Six sensors and Vizzia software to manage sensor data, the hospital automatically knows of any temperature fluctuations that might occur throughout the day at each cooler. The temperature data is transmitted at five-minute intervals, and is compared against the minimum and maximum ranges stipulated in Vizzia’s software. In the event that the temperature rises or drops out of range, an alert is automatically triggered and an email or text message is sent directly to the hospital.
“This is what regulators want to see,” Halasz states, “and is often difficult for busy clinical staff to keep up with.” What’s more, he says, the EM Help Desk ensures that hospital managers receive only alerts requiring a response, so that they are not inundated with messages for which they do not need to take action. “This helps eliminate alert fatigue and, more importantly, makes sure things like medicines, food and blood are safe for patients and staff to use.”
The temperature sensors will also be installed in Piedmont’s other hospitals through a measured approach. “We’re rolling things out in a contained way,” Halasz says, “to be able to measure the before and after in a department-by-departmental way.”
In the future, Kelley says, Piedmont intends to trial a hand-hygiene system to ensure that care providers wash their hands before and after meeting with every patient. Down the line, he adds, the facility might also opt to test the RTLS‘s ability to track patients and staff members.