The Health Care RFID Blog

In the last few days there has been a lot of talk in the health care industry surrounding President Obama’s most recent health care proposal.  The year-long effort, and the fourth proposal, is focused on making health care more affordable, making health insurers more accountable, expanding healthcare coverage to all Americans and making the health system sustainable. A large portion of the proposal focuses on reforming health care insurance—designed to reduce the cost of healthcare for patients.  Moreover, Title III of the proposal, “Improving the Quality and Efficiency of Health Care,” includes incentivizing doctors, nurses and hospitals to improve care and reduce unnecessary errors that harm patients.

While the government focuses on roping in costs and incentives to improve patient care, what are healthcare providers doing to help meet these objectives?

Some of the most costly healthcare issues are healthcare acquired infections (HAIs). Annually, HAIs are estimated to affect more than 1.7 million patients, kill 99,000 patients, and cost between $35 billion and $45 billion. Under the new federal reimbursement policy, payment for care required as a result of HAIs will no longer be approved, making prevention urgently important to the bottom line. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), HAIs are a top 10 cause of death in America.

One of the simplest ways HAIs can be prevented is by medical personnel properly washing their hands. 

While Washington works on the insurance issues, health care providers are looking to health information technology (HIT), including RFID solutions, to help reduce cost, minimize risks and improve patient care now.  One of the best ways to prevent HAIs is hand-washing, and one of the easiest ways to ensure compliance is to back it with technology.

The hand-hygiene solution provided by Dynamic, built on Versus’ IR-RF technology, consists of badges, ceiling sensors and soap/sanitizer dispensers retrofitted with sensors. When a person dispenses soap or sanitizer, the sensor reads the ID badge and timestamps the occurrence.  If a badged person approaches a patient prior to handwashing, the system alerts the individual audibly. The information is stored in a database for reporting and is easily integrated with other systems.

The system effectively addresses hand-hygiene compliance by automatically capturing hand-washing data in the background, 24-7. It alerts staff on compliance in real time, allowing hospitals to prevent adverse events before they occur. The system tracks who washed their hands and when. 

Other RFID and RTLS solutions, such as patient tracking, medication tracking and lab tracking can help bring down the costs of healthcare by ensuring costly errors are not made. Let Washington worry about insurance reform and healthcare providers can focus on how to reduce costs, minimize risks and most important, improve patient care with HIT.

A study published in BMC Emergency Medicine found that 60 percent of unintended incidents in the ER were cause by human error. The study, entitled “The nature and causes of unintended events reported at 10 emergency departments” found that of 522 reported unintended events:

• 60% had a human root cause
• 25% had an organizational cause
• 11% had a technical cause
• 25%  were related to cooperation with other departments
• 20% were related to problems with materials/equipment
• More than half had consequences for the patient, “most often resulting in inconvenience or suboptimal care.”
• Nearly half of the root causes were external to the ED (either attributable to other departments in or outside of the hospital)

The study concludes that interventions should be made to facilitate inter-departmental collaboration.

RFID-based RTLS solutions to automatically capture data on the identity, location and status of people and equipment in hospitals can prevent many types of human error and enhance patient safety. Costs are reduced as a result of greater efficiency, and revenues are increased as patient throughput is expedited. Interdepartmental and interfacility communication are enhanced by automatically sharing real time information across the care continuum.

To learn more about how RFID improves patient care, reduces costs and minimizes risks in hospitals, contact us via simple web form.

Sign up here for our Oct. 16 informational Webinar on improving patient safety with an RFID solution to prevent HAIs