How to Use Real-Time Tracking to Manage Hospital Equipment: 7 Tips from the University of California San Diego Medical Center

Busy hospitals transport hundreds of patients daily through different areas of the facility. From the emergency department to surgery to patient rooms, staff members use a wide variety of equipment to move and treat these patients.

As a result of all of this movement, vital equipment is often lost or misplaced, resulting in wasted time as staff members search for equipment. Hospitals may feel the financial impact, too, as items that cannot be found require ordering new supplies.

Scott Sullivan, department business officer for perioperative services, imaging and procedurals at the University of California San Diego Medical Center, discusses seven tips for tracking equipment that is commonly lost or misplaced at a busy hospital.

1. Understand the true usage of equipment in your department. Many busy hospitals are confronted with the challenge of how to effectively track the usage of equipment. Commonly used items, such as gurneys, wheelchairs and IV pumps, are often rented from outside vendors so that hospitals aren't charged with the additional task of storing or purchasing the equipment. However, without an accurate track of usage, these items are often rented longer than necessary, costing the hospital money that could be allocated elsewhere.

"With many items, we never knew where they were left during the day. Often, due to reluctance to give up equipment, items would just be sitting, unused, on the floor," Mr. Sullivan says. "We would then order another rental from one of our vendors to fill our need because we didn't think there was one available."

In order to help accurately assess the hospital's equipment needs, UCSD Medical Center installed a real-time location system (RTLS) to help track and catalogue equipment that was constantly misplaced. The system, which includes a series of wireless sensors that transmit data about the location and other aspects, such as condition or need for maintenance,  of equipment, was useful in noting trends about how certain items were being used within a department at the hospital.

"With the real-time system, we could track utilization of an item and determine if we really needed a second [such an item]," Mr. Sullivan says. "For example, we used to allocate eight pumps for our PACU. After tracking utilization, we cut down that number by one or two pumps."

By reducing the number of rentals, UCSD saved money as equipment was usually rented on a per-day-fee schedule.

2. Tracking equipment will require a culture change, so be prepared. When processes aren't running as efficiently as they should, many bad habits can be created. For example, if a nurse routinely requests an IV pump from central services department and routinely is told one is not available, he or she may start storing pumps on the floor so that one is always available.

Since these behaviors may have been occurring at the facility for months or even years, implementing a system to fix workflow problems also entails addressing these bad behaviors and letting staff know that their previous concerns have been addressed.

Mr. Sullivan encountered this skepticism when first implementing the real-time location system at UCSD. "It really was a paradigm change," he says. "We had to let the staff see the assurance that the central department would get them their items as soon as they could turnover and clean the equipment. We had to change the thought process so they knew they didn't need to hoard items as they had in the past."

3. Maintain a good tracking system so clinical staff can concentrate on patient care. Aside from eating into profits, time spent locating equipment can affect patient care as well, especially when nurses and other staff members have to leave the patient's bedside to search for equipment.

"[Having a location system] helps to keep the surgical staff with patients. They can call the front desk, and if they must leave the room, it is for a minimal amount of time, because the specific room the item is in is known. They can go directly there, retrieve the item and return to patient care within minutes," Mr. Sullivan says.

Lost equipment is not limited to hospital areas outside of the operating room. Surgeons often encounter similar delays due to locating misplaced items. Headlamps used for surgery are just one example. According to Mr. Sullivan, the time wasted looking for equipment needed in surgery is just one cause of delayed procedures, which can lead to overtime costs that can eat into hospital profits.

4. When using a location system, it is not necessary to track every piece of equipment. Tracking easily misplaced items, like gurneys and IV pumps, can improve processes at a hospital, but if the hospital relies on a location system to do the tracking, processes can once again become inefficient, according to Mr. Sullivan.

"In theory, tracking every piece of equipment would be great, but, in practice, it removes all accountability from staff members who are responsible for maintaining the equipment," Mr. Sullivan says. "Having the business intelligence to proactively alert when par levels fall, or equipment accumulates in dirty utility rooms, for example, helps our staff be better accountable for having the right equipment, clean and ready to use, in the right place at the right time."

5. Big ticket items are not necessarily the items you want to track. A vital piece of equipment is not necessary those that cost thousands of dollars, but rather are those that are critical to keeping the hospital running smoothly. Value can be measured in dollars, usage or both.

"We tagged the senior nurse's mobile phone in the emergency department," Mr. Sullivan says. "The tag probably costs more than the phone, but the need is there, especially in the time spent when it is being looked for. We also tagged a portable defibrillator. When it was needed, we could track it and found it was sitting in a manager's office."

6. Track items that may be used at multiple campuses. For large hospital systems that include multiple medical campuses, equipment is often taken with patients who are transferred between hospitals. Real-time tracking can help one branch of the hospital get an accurate sense of what equipment has been transferred with the patient, according to Mr. Sullivan. "This also allows us to have confidence in loaning equipment from hospital to hospital — knowing we can immediately locate it from a central tracking system assures us we can get to what we need when we need it."

Specialized equipment is another item that organizations may want to consider tracking from campus to campus.

7. To achieve maximum benefit, your RTLS deployment must have enterprise-wide coverage. There are advantages to using real-time tracking both on a department level and a whole hospital level. Starting with equipment owned by a single department, such as OR, can help your hospital see how the equipment is used by that unit. An enterprise network is critical, since assets travel throughout the hospital, the asset tracking system can help find equipment that has left that department or been "loaned" to another floor.

"It is important to decide if you are looking to help one specific area or improve equipment tracking in the entire hospital," Mr. Sullivan says. "Remember, the goal of tracking is to get staff back to the patients quicker, and part of that is helping our staff to return pieces of equipment to their proper place."

Learn more about UCSD Medical Center.

Thank you to Awarepoint for coordinating the interview with Mr. Sullivan. Learn more about Awarepoint.