GOLDSBORO, NC – Tom Bradshaw’s son was being treated at Wayne Memorial Hospital and was hooked up to an IV pump.
Bradshaw, familiar with the need to have medical equipment regularly inspected, noticed that the pump’s inspection sticker had expired.
“I talked to the biomed engineering department and brought this up,” said Bradshaw, the hospital’s vice president of operations. “The manager said, ‘You found it! We’ve been looking for that pump for months.’ ”
Tracking inventory in large healthcare buildings has never been easy, and it results in wasted time for medical personnel and other money-costing practices. Now, technology is enabling organizations to know where expensive stock is located.
That’s resulting in a return on investment for Bradshaw’s hospital, which is expected to open up other opportunities for using the technology and additional savings.
The facility became a beta site for the real-time location system developed by RadarFind, a Morrisville, N.C.-based company that uses tracking tags that send signals to readers that send location information through a facility’s network infrastructure to a server. Staff are then able to use a browser on the facility’s intranet to find equipment.
In the initial test of the technology with infusion pumps, the 300-bed facility was able to get a better handle on how they were being used and how many of the expensive devices were actually needed, Bradshaw said.
“We had budgeted based on historical information to purchase 332 pumps. With the technology, we were able to see what the utilization was, and from that we deduced that we needed 53 fewer pumps,” he said.
Capital savings on pump purchases totaled $276,000, and an additional $26,000 was saved by avoiding ongoing maintenance on the pumps, Bradshaw estimated.
Another area of savings can be found in the use of wheelchairs, an expensive and at times elusive asset. Wayne Memorial used to conduct monthly “wheelchair roundups” on Saturdays, when staff would find all the chairs and redistribute them evenly.
With RadarFind, wheelchairs can be tracked on a real-time basis, eliminating the need for a roundup and saving $6,000 in labor costs. Also, chairs can be found quicker – in 10 minutes vs. 25 minutes previously.
In addition, hospital officials realized they had only 51 chairs, instead of the 84 they thought they had. The extra 33 were not needed, and the facility saved $18,000 by not buying additional chairs, Bradshaw said.