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A 12-person team of BWHers swept through every nook and cranny of the hospital two weeks ago. Their mission: find and tag patient care equipment with an RFID chip, a tracking device that makes it fast and easy to locate missing or needed equipment.
“We went unit to unit, placing the RFID chip on equipment so that we can track it and make sure it’s available when nurses need it for patient care,” said Leo Buckley, director of Business Services for Patient Care Services, who is co-chair of the SWAT Surge Committee working to make patient care equipment readily available.
BWH uses an RFID (or radio-frequency identification) location system created by Radianse, a Massachusetts-based health care technology company. Each tag contains a unique barcode, and details about the tagged device, including the owner and serial number, are stored in the Radianse system. Operations supervisors and equipment technicians can locate equipment through the software provided by Radianse.
The use of RFID is especially important this month as BWH accommodates a seasonal increase of inpatients. “We often had trouble finding equipment, and that means patient flow could have been affected,” said Mimi O’Connor of Patient Care Services and member of the SWAT Surge Committee. “RFID is helping to resolve that.”
BWH rolled out RFID across the hospital last month after piloting the technology. IS and Biomedical Engineering collaborated to put the infrastructure in place for this new system. More than 4,000 pieces of equipment, including PCA pumps, defibrillators, bladder scanners and telemetry equipment, already have been tagged.
“We identified the critical devices that can compromise patient flow,” said Wasib Hayat, clinical engineer, Biomedical Engineering, and a member of the SWAT team. “If you can’t find these devices, patients can’t be treated.”
Staff are noticing improvements. “PCA pumps and Alaris pumps have been more available to us in the PACU recently,” said Ellen Sullivan, BSN, RN, CPAN, a nurse in-charge in the PACU.
Nurses and patient care staff aren’t the only ones with positive feedback. “Our equipment technicians, who respond to staff requests, are thrilled,” said Susan Sabino, manager of the Equipment Pool in Central Transport. “Equipment is more available now, allowing them to better meet the needs of patients and nursing staff.”
The use of RFID in locating equipment helped the Surge Committee decide to purchase 12 more PCA pumps and rent ten DASH monitors, which often are needed by patients in the ED before they can be admitted to inpatient floors. The recent addition of a night-shift equipment technician to gather equipment from the floors, clean it and make it available to the OR, PACU and ED first thing in the morning has also been important in this effort to make equipment available where and when it is needed. The committee is also working with all the patient care areas to encourage them to put unused, available equipment in clean alcoves for pick up and reuse hospitalwide.