Special Report on Pharma & Healthcare

Healthcare organizations today face numerous challenges due to lack of visibility – low utilization rates, over rental and over purchasing of medical equipment, non compliance with regulatory mandates, inefficient use of staff time, loss and theft of equipment and more. Leveraging an existing hospital Wi-Fi network provides visibility over a single unified solution at a low cost of ownership, combining a wide variety of location, status and condition information about valuable medical assets, patients and staff. Solutions should span all hospital departments and serve the needs of clinical staff, IT, materials management, clinical and biomedical engineers, laboratory personnel and others.

Asset management

Mobile medical equipment inventory management poses many challenges: clinical staff is constantly searching for medical devices such as infusion pumps and wheelchairs, wait times for ordered equipment are long, clean utility rooms do not have the appropriate par levels for equipment, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of assets are lost and stolen on an annual basis and assets have low utilization rates. With a visibility solution hospitals can automate all the inventory management and receive real-time inventory counts at the click of a button, full control of rental equipment inventory is achieved, par level management is automated and material management and distribution services can receive automated alerts. In addition, trends in equipment availability and utilization can be easily identified and analyzed.

Condition monitoring

Safe temperature ranges for organs, vaccines, blood bags, food and pharmaceuticals are ensured through an automated Wi-Fi monitoring and alerting system. AeroScout’s Wi-Fi temperature tags are simply placed in hospital refrigerators or freezers. In addition, humidity ranges in patient or operating rooms are monitored by Wi-Fi humidity tags. The solution leverages the hospital’s existing Wi-Fi network, it requires no dedicated sensor network, no hard wires and is easy to install. In addition, AeroScout’s MobileView software provides automated temperature and humidity monitoring and alerting, as well as all required logging and reporting data for regulatory compliance.

Clinical and bio-med engineers maintain thousands of medical devices periodically. In many cases, a high percentage of the equipment is not maintained on time since assets cannot be found, leading to non compliance and quality of care issues. Any tagged equipment throughout the hospital campus can be located according to preventive maintenance pickup schedules and automated maintenance alerts can also include equipment location and status. The solution can also be integrated to any existing clinical engineering system.

Workflow and safety

In OR and ER/ED environments, knowing the exact location and status of patients, physicians, available rooms and key clinical equipment is critical to improving patient care, automating departmental workflow and increasing throughput. In these departments it is important to be able to get not only to a room or zone level accuracy, but also to a bay level accuracy (i.e. in Pre-Op or Recovery areas). In addition, all the location and status data should be integrated with relevant OR/ER information systems, enabling to prioritize and automate procedures and manage resources efficiently.

At-risk patients (i.e. psychiatric, dementia, Alzheimer, elderly) may need to alert staff in case of emergency when out of bed. In addition they may be wandering into restricted areas or exiting the building in an unauthorized manner. Hospital staff may also need to trigger an alert should there be a patient problem or if patients are posing risk to them.

Challenges

Hospital asset management is a constant challenge for materials managers, nurses, distribution and transport services:
• Hundreds of hours per year are spent inventorying and searching for equipment
• up to 15% of all high-value equipment may be lost, stolen or misplaced in a given year
• par level management (equipment par levels per nursing unit or hospital area) and equipment sterilization processes are inefficient due to sub-optimal workflow, equipment hoarding, and a lack of real-time location and status of equipment
• low equipment utilization rates (often below 40%) result in excess purchasing and high capital expenditures
• unnecessary equipment rentals and late returns of rentals significantly increase operational costs
• waiting for ordered equipment may delay patient procedures and reduce patient throughput
• liability issues arise from problems locating recalled equipment and from equipment software not being updated on time
• regulations (e.g., SOX) require accurate accounting for asset inventory.

Solution

Mobile equipment (e.g., infusion pumps, defibrillators, portable X-Ray equipment, beds, wheelchairs) is tagged with Wi-Fi Tags. The tags periodically (every few seconds or minutes) report their location over the Wi-Fi network. The tag’s battery is replaceable and lasts for several years. A location engine collects the tag signals that are received by all of the Wi-Fi access points that hear a tag when it transmits. This information is used to determine the location of the tag and to help managers understand utilization rates. The status can be obtained when a staff member presses the tag call button or according to the asset’s location (e.g., in a soiled or clean utility room). The equipment’s operational status may also be obtained by integrating the tag’s serial connector to the medical device allowing the tag to retrieve information from the device – for example, the operational status of an infusion pump to determine whether the pump is in use or not. In addition, MobileView can aggregate status information on assets from other hospital information systems such as bed management or infusion pump management systems.

Par level management improves materials distribution and purchasing, by automating how many pieces of equipment are in each zone, floor or utility room to effectively and efficiently meet the equipment requirements associated with each department. The solution enables tracking, in real-time, of when a piece of equipment enters or leaves an area, such as a soiled or clean utility room, or a centralized distribution area. Hospital users can set up automated alerts through MobileView to inform staff when there is a shortage or surplus of equipment in an area. This enables materials management to more accurately understand the current and future equipment needs of hospital staff.

When equipment is requested by nursing and clinical staff, distribution services staff can run on-demand searches and are able to locate the nearest available asset. This enables them to rapidly fulfill orders and reduce wait times. Real-time reports and integration of the equipment location and status data into the existing order management system can further simplify order management workflow and facilitate effective “sweeps” and replacements.

Inventory management can be automated by accessing a variety of reports in MobileView. Inventory reports enable staff to perform real-time inventory counts throughout the entire hospital facility. Utilization reports are an effective tool to help managers assess capital equipment purchasing requirements and allocation among hospital departments. In addition, staff can be alerted, in real-time, when equipment is leaving a certain area to prevent shrinkage and loss.

Tracking rental equipment throughout the hospital ensures that equipment is returned on time. Moreover, utilization analysis enables optimization of the balance between capital and rental equipment.

If implemented, this level of integration can provide improved asset utilization and purchase management resulting in reduced capital expenditures as well as rental costs.

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