Summa Akron City Hospital uses RFID technology to track emergency patient waiting time
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In 2012, Summa Akron City Hospital increased the capacity of the Emergency Department (ED) to meet the increasing demand of patients.In order to understand that this expansion has improved the efficiency of the patient’s transportation from the ambulance stretcher to the hospital bed, ED used the stretcherRFIDTechnology to determine whether there is a patient on the stretcher. The technology is provided by Barcoding, and was recently used by hospitals to identify the response time of hospitals for influenza in the winter of 2015.
The ED department of Akron City Hospital treats trauma, stroke or heart attack patients from 30 cities. The department receives 270 patients every day and treats 80,000 patients every year, of which 19,000 arrive at the hospital by ambulance. This number is increasing every year, partly because many patients seek medical treatment in this way rather than by appointment. Approximately 30 different institutions—such as the Urban Emergency Medical Service (EMS) and firefighting companies, private ambulance companies, etc.—will take patients to the emergency department of the hospital on a stretcher.
After being sent to the hospital, the patient (and the staff of the ambulance company or EMS) will wait for a free bed. When there is free time, the staff of the EMS or the ambulance company will ask the patient to take the bed and leave. Jon Zalewski, the hospital’s EMS coordinator, said that the hospital treats both patients and EMS agencies as customers. The hospital has been working hard to shorten the waiting time for hospital beds to less than 15 minutes. However, in the past ten years, due to the increase in the number of medical treatments, these emergency agencies have been complaining about longer and longer waiting times for transportation.
In 2009, the hospital began to look for ways to track waiting time. The hospital tried to allow employees to monitor the waiting time of the beds, but because employees were not at the bed all the time, data collection became very difficult.
Zalewski said: “We cannot accept the long transport time of patients from the ambulance to the ED bed.”
Hospitals need a way to measure the true waiting time of patients. By using the RFID system, the hospital can now intuitively calculate the waiting time.
In 2010, the hospital began to trial the RFID system. The system attached Confidex passive UHF RFID tags to the stretcher and installed Weatherproof RFID readers near the entrance of the hospital. The reader can transfer data to a computer via USB. Zalewski said that the reader used in the trial was designed for trade shows.
The hospital tested this technology for a total of six months. During this time, the hospital marked 65 stretchers from 19 institutions. However, the reading rate of stretcher tags is only 76%, which is far below the hospital’s expectations. In addition, tags are often lost during calculations. This is the second problem encountered by this system.
After the completion of this pilot, the hospital continued to use RFID reader mobile phone data and expanded its use to 100 stretchers in 30 institutions.
In 2012, the number of hospital beds increased from 45 to 75, and the hospital began to use RFID data to confirm whether the waiting time had decreased. The hospital’s goal is to reduce the handling time of 90% of emergency patients to less than 15 minutes, and the waiting time for all patients to be handled within 30 minutes.
This RFID solution tracks the transportation time as follows: EMS or emergency agency staff carry the stretcher with the RFID tag that carries the patient. When passing the gate, the reader will read the tag ID number, and the system will determine that the patient has arrived at the hospital. When the patient arrives on the bed and returns to the gate, the reader will read the tag again. In this way, the hospital manager can see two identical ID numbers in the Excel table, and calculate the waiting time for transportation based on this data.
Recently, the hospital switched to using Impinj readers and standard UHF RFID readers. These labels are wrapped in a plastic shell to prevent collision and fall.
After using these new readers and tags, the system can read tags passing in two directions at the same time. This year, the system will be used to identify changes in waiting times during the flu season and the most crowded moments of the day.
Zalewski said that the system allows hospitals to know the real waiting time, which is its biggest role. Hospitals can send time data to EMS companies at high speed and take actions to reduce waiting time.
Zalewski said that at present, the hospital can only view the data after the end of the work day. In the future, he hopes that the system can display real-time data. However, this also poses new challenges to funding.
Currently, this solution is quite cost-effective. The tag unit price is US$7.5, and the reader price is less than US$3,000.
(Exclusive manuscript of rfid world network, please indicate the source author for reprinting!)
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