Greenville Hospital Keeping up with Expensive Equipment
Problem: The loss of expensive surgical equipment in the 90,000 square foot Greenville Hospital was resulting in lost time and money due to the time spent looking for and/or replacing equipment. The staff was experiencing the greatest amount of tool loss after usage in patients’ rooms and operating rooms.
Solution: Each hospital room is thoroughly cleaned after the patient leaves, so portal systems developed by Jamison and ThingMagic were placed in all laundry and decontamination rooms. All tools were tagged with RFID tags, so when a tagged tool was read at a portal location, an alert was triggered to notify the staff that a tool was in the wrong location. Handheld readers deployed to staff members were designed to locate specific tagged equipment and read the usage history of each tool.
Notable Take-away: With the reduction in equipment loss and wasted time, Greenville Hospital expects a return on investment within one year and is currently expanding their system.