Huntsville Hospital uses RFID to greatly improve operating room efficiency and communication
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The surgical operating room of Huntsville Hospital in Alabama uses a passive RFID system to track all aspects of the operation and accurately identify patients, thereby improving the efficiency of the department and the quality of medical services.
Huntsville Hospital, Alabama
Huntsville Hospital uses Aionex’s Advanced Patient Response Platform (APRP), which currently has RFID capabilities, is a software product that integrates communications and transactions, and can be used to monitor medical staff and track patients. The system uses passive RFID tags and readers from SkyeTek, operating at 13.56 MHz, and complying with ISO 15693, ISO 14443A and ISO 18000-3 air interface protocols. The label is embedded in the sticker and key ring.
Huntsvill Hospital has a total of 881 beds and started testing the system a year ago. According to Kitty Cathcart, a senior application analyst in the surgical department of the hospital, after several months of testing, the system was officially launched in the preoperative preparation room, followed by the operating room, and finally in the anesthesia recovery room (PACU). Now the hospital distributes an average of 2,400 RFID tags (in the form of stickers) to patients and 25 RFID tags (in the form of key rings) to the anesthesiologist every month.
At the time, Huntsville Hospital decided to adopt the APRP system with RFID function in order to improve work efficiency and employee communication, both of which directly affect the start time of the operation. “The unreasonable arrangement of patient throughput and work flow of medical staff often creates bottlenecks in the complete care of patients. The surgical department has analyzed several factors that promote this phenomenon.” Cathcart said. The hospital especially hopes that the system can achieve the following functions: medical staff can learn about the sequence of surgery and the status of the staff through an LCD monitor screen, and improve the communication between staff by real-time understanding of the latest situation of the patient; an automatic identification of patients who are preparing for surgery Mechanism: The hospital can send alerts (in the form of e-mail, text paging and mobile phone calls) to notify relevant personnel of upcoming, ongoing and delayed operations, and record the start and end time of the operation and the flow of staff.
Aionex’s APRP system is a Web-based system that uses a well-defined regular engine to track and communicate progress and event status. The hospital checks the patient’s condition through an electronic whiteboard, a PC and a handheld computer running software. In the past few years, APRP used infrared ID tags and readers to track medical staff and patients, but Aionex’s APRP system added SkyeTek’s RFID function a year ago. “One of the reasons why we have not adopted infrared technology is cost. Aionex CEO Curt Freemyer said: “An IR ID tag costs US$50. Many times patients have to cut it off during surgery. A few, this is quite wasteful. ”
At Huntsville Hospital, patients put on RFID stickers when they arrived in the surgical operating room. The ID number of the sticker corresponds to the patient’s name and other information stored in the Aionex database. In each procedure of the operation, the medical staff will scan the label, and the ID number of the label will automatically enter a patient information kiosk. The kiosk is embedded with a CPU, a touch monitoring screen, a Wi-Fi card and an RFID scanner. Cathcart explained: “The kiosk will compare the patient’s name and the information corresponding to the tag ID number. If the information does not match, the kiosk will generate an error.”
In the operation preparation room, the patient’s tag was read by the anesthesiologist again, and the anesthesiologist also read his own RFID key ring through a handheld reader to record the incident. All readings have a recording time, and medical staff can check the operation status on the large LCD screen. When the patient enters and leaves the operating room and the anesthesia recovery room, the patient tags are also read one by one, recording the time the patient stays in each area.
Since the adoption of this system, the utilization rate of the operating room in Huntsville Hospital has been higher, and the staff have a clear understanding of the patient’s real-time location and condition. When the hospital began to adopt more system reporting functions, it analyzed the progress of the operation and improved the utilization rate of the room.
Huntsville Hospital has a high evaluation of this system. The system helps the hospital record outpatient clinical records and patient surgery schedules, which improves the efficiency of the entire department.
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