Electro-Enabled Savings

An enthusiastic adopter of radiofrequency identification (RFID) since 2006, Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare in Florida is preparing to extend its use of the real-time tracking technology from things to people in a freestanding, 45,000-square-foot emergency center scheduled to open in May 2013.

Jay Adams, the 772-bed hospital’s IT enterprise architect who has spearheaded many of its RFID efforts, says transmitting tags will be placed on patients’ wristbands and nurses’ employee ID badges. The plan is to use the collected data to streamline ED nurses’ workflow while reducing inefficiencies in patient movement within the ED and, after admission, throughout the hospital.

That will be then. For now, many observers—along with late and tentative RFID adopters—want to know about return on investment so far.
“A lot of your savings tie back to soft costs,” says Adams. “If you save a nurse five minutes a day checking temperatures of medication refrigerators—where she doesn’t have to manually check and log that information because RFID is doing it automatically, and alerting her if the temperature rises above a set level—that adds up to a lot of hours saved over the course of a year. The same goes for clinical engineers, where they don’t have to hunt and peck through the floors to find medical devices that need preventive maintenance or recall actions anymore. Those time savings really add up.”

For example, a smartpump manufacturer recalled the device to install an improved battery system. Clinical engineering “took the call, set up a project and, using the RFID system, found and fixed all 500 pumps in two weeks,” Adams recalls. “Responsiveness that quick would have been unheard of in the days prior to RFID. The job would have taken months.”

Adams also points to the technology’s capability to head off unnecessary purchases and rentals. He says Tallahassee Memorial reduced its inventory of infusion pumps from nearly 700 to around 500, with no fall off in service levels, when the time came to replace the old units with smartpump technology. One reason is because the tracking allows for more even distribution across all units.
He says the hospital is now saving between $60,000 and $80,000 a year avoiding unnecessary buys and an immeasurable amount keeping devices from leaving the building or otherwise disappearing.

Returns are important to executive leadership because the technology doesn’t come cheap. The transmitting tags alone go for $70 each, and Tallahassee Memorial has so far purchased around 3,300 of them. Figure in the cost of the underlying wireless infrastructure needed to support the system, along with licensing and a host of other outlays, and the cost of entry can be exorbitant for smaller hospitals. Adams says some might consider getting in at a “low level of granularity and accuracy”—meaning one could use RFID to know that an asset is on a floor without being able to pinpoint which room it’s in.

He also urges first securing buy-in from nursing, clinical engineering and materials management—including learning what they would want to accomplish with RFID capabilities—and then validating the vendor’s claims on the product’s performance in an all-hands-on-deck pilot project. “That step is critical,” says Adams. “If you skip it, you’re heading for a failure.”