RFID in Today’s Intelligent Hospital Enhancing Patient Care & Optimizing Hospital Operations

Over the last decade the changing healthcare environment has driven hospitals to critically evaluate and optimize their operations to enhance patient treatment and care, while focusing on financial constraints. The hospitals have moved to support an increasing outpatient care environment, driving increasing in-patient acuity levels. At many institutions these changes have been accompanied with regulatory and financial constraints impacting the operating budgets. Specific initiatives, such as the Joint Commission's patient safety goals, electronic medical record and meaning full use have driven institutions to re-design their operations and processes, using technology solutions to achieve these goals, while optimizing operational workflow and resource utilization. To deal with the complexity of patient care workflows, enhance patient diagnosis, treatment, care, safety and satisfaction, the design of Intelligent Hospitals has focused on the integration of diverse technologies, to provide a seamless exchange of information. This has driven hospitals to integrate RFID into a variety of hospital operations and processes. The overall cost of an RFID deployment not only includes the capital purchase but more significantly the on-going operational cost and impact. RFID systems represent a significant investment were the return on investment is realized through the deployment of a broad set of applications and use cases. RFID includes two main types of solutions, including institutional visualization and tracking and localized choke point solution including validations and process verification. This paper outlines the strategies for the deployment of large scale RTLS / RFID solutions based on 10+ years of experience at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). MSK has deployed 12,000 active tags and 35,000 passive tags associated to medical devices. The strategies include, system scaling, requirements for accuracy and resolution, program management, managing an increasing quantity of tags and tag types, monitoring the effectiveness of the solution and managing impacts of complexity and interference, as well as establishing dedicated support model and structure. The paper highlights multiple uses targeting enhanced asset management, optimized workflow and process validation.