Could Hospital Crash Cart Inventory An Opening For Medical Rfid?

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Looking for ways toreduce cost and improve accuracy in supplying drugs on their hospitals

crash carts, The University of Maryland Medical Center has jumped into using radio frequency identification or RFID.

The University of Maryland Medical Center signed on with a startup company called Kit Check to place RFID tags on the drug containers and to set up RFID readers and system software.

Ive written about RFID tags for patient identification in this blog before (you can read that post here). I noted that one of the objections to RFID is the potential for breach of patient confidentiality. In the case of supplies, obviously that objection goes away. Other problems for patient ID include the cost of the tags and technical infrastructure and the difficulty of reading the tags in a hospital setting.

Using RFID to maintain pharmaceutical inventory seems like a much better application. Since only a portion of the supplies are replaced each time, the hospital can save time during each inventory by not recounting items. And they can scan an entire tray of 25-plus items all at one time in one place.
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Even with those benefits, it seems as if the University and Kit Check are struggling a bit to justify the transition to RFID inventory. Adrianne Shepardson, manager of Marylands Central Pharmacy Services, says that even with RFID, pharmacists still must tag each vial, box or bag of drugs and visually inspect each tray and account for missing items. Quoted in an article in the Baltimore Sun newspaper, she describes RFID as a reliable double check. In short, the new system supplements rather than replaces the standard manual operation.

Kit Check offers a white paper on cost saving, and I requested one to see the companys rationale for RFID. The tone of the paper is fair and balanced, but you may question some of results of their testing. For instance, they say that checking a code tray manually takes on average 15 minutes of the time of a tech and another 15 minutes of a pharmacist. Using RFID, they say it takes a minute and a half. Actually, to be precise, they said 1:31.2.

This time saving will produce financial saving of $14.14 per tray, according to the white paper. However, there is no mention of any offsetting costs of the RFID system.

Kit Check argues that in addition to this compelling business case for RFID, a hospital will make fewer errors.

It is interesting, isnt it? As more hospitals adopt the system we will find out whether this is truly an advancement for RFID or whether it is technology is search of a problem.

by:Mike Ferring

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