East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust, one of the largest hospital Trusts in England, is using RFID Discovery from Harland Simon to automatically track the location of 3000 mobile medical devices across three hospital sites.
Andy Barrow, EBME Manager at the Trust, is responsible for managing medical devices at William Harvey, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Kent & Canterbury Hospitals.
He comments: “Managing a large fleet of medical devices across three hospital sites is always a challenge. Shrinking budgets coupled with increasing patient numbers drive us to look at new ways of approaching this task. Tracking the location of mobile medical devices with RFID technology means that we can maximise utilisation levels and therefore reduce the amount of new devices needed. We have also significantly reduced the time our technicians and nurses spend looking for equipment.”
Andy chose Harland Simon after several months of investigation and following detailed discussions with other hospitals which have introduced RFID solutions. “We looked at a number of systems before choosing RFID Discovery. As a tracking solution it was already delivering excellent benefits and ROI for other NHS Trusts, and we certainly haven’t been disappointed with the results we have achieved so far.”
RFID Discovery enables hospitals to easily locate medical devices using a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) location based solution. Each device is fitted with an active RFID tag, which sends a regular message to a network of fixed readers placed at various locations throughout the three hospitals. In addition, mobile readers are also used by the clinical engineering team to audit wards in a fraction of the time it used to take.
RFID Discovery has been fully integrated with East Kent’s F2 Asset Management System from Infohealth. This means location data for medical device is accessible directly through the F2 asset database.
