The progressive telemetry unit at St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, Va., has saved money since it started electronically tracking equipment. Now $200 thermometers and other must-have items are less likely to go missing. But that is not the top attribute of the new radio frequency identification (RFID) system, says Cindy Gumm, nurse manager for the 24-bed unit.
More important, the unit’s nurses have more time to spend on patient care. “We had to do something--the nurses didn’t have the tools they needed to do their job,” says Gumm. “They were spending an inordinate amount of time looking for equipment.”
Equipment Located Electronically
St. Mary’s, a 391-bed hospital in the Bon Secours Richmond Health System, recently began tracking assets at the department level. Two types of equipment were particularly prone to “walking away” from the telemetry unit: thermometers and pulse oximeters.
“They were being misplaced or people (from other units) were borrowing them.
It seemed that I was always reordering those pieces of equipment,” says Gumm. Indeed, she was spending nearly $5,000 a year to replace equipment that the telemetry unit owned but could no longer find.
With a RFID tag providing information on each piece of equipment, the system keeps an automatically updated inventory of the location and availability of the unit’s assets (for example, in use or out of circulation for maintenance). Every Monday and Friday morning, the unit secretary checks to make sure that all portable equipment is accounted for.
“If she comes in and a piece of equipment is not identified here on this unit, we have the capability to search (electronically) throughout the house to find where our equipment is,” says Gumm.
Meanwhile, if a nurse cannot find something--say a pulse oximeter--during the week, a quick click on a picture of that equipment on the computer screen will identify the location of the closest available item. That easy access frees nurses for patient care. Anecdotal evidence suggests that nurses spend up to 30 minutes a day searching for the equipment they need.
The biggest problem, says Dan Neuwirth, COO for Agility Healthcare Solutions, is that equipment may be used by several nursing units but not be owned by a single department. The second problem category is equipment, such as wheelchairs and stretchers that are used to move patients within the hospital. “That’s another hot-button item--a shared fleet of transport devices that, by definition, move around as you’re moving patients around,” says Neuwirth.
Department-specific items, such as the thermometers owned by Gumm’s unit, are the third category of missing-in-action assets.
Human Behavior Changes
Gumm has found that tagging equipment--her unit has about 50 items tagged--with an electronic leash changes human behavior. “The other departments that used to borrow our equipment know that little tag is a sensor, so that is a policing function that keeps them from using it,” she says.
Meanwhile, nurses on her unit have a new attitude about tracking equipment that is rightfully their own. “They’ve taken responsibility to say, ‘That is our equipment, and we want it to stay here in our unit because we know it’s important to have the tools we need to do our job,’” she says.
Cynthia Gumm is nurse manager at St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, Va. (cynthia_gumm@bshsi.org). Dan Neuwirth is COO at Agility Healthcare Solutions in Glen Allen, Va.(dneuwirth@agilityhealthcare.com).