The Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, based in São Paulo, is making strides to better manage its medical equipment while at the same time improving patient-physician time with the use of asset tracking technology.
"Our staff lose a lot of time looking for equipment," said Sergio Arai, CIO of Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein. "Because of this, we began studying workflow and other hospitals using RFID in the US and wanted to have clinical staff spend more time with patients."
The hospital is in the process of finishing its deployment of AeroScout's Asset Tracking and Temperature Monitoring solutions. So far, said Arai, the hospital has experienced multiple benefits.
"We are always talking about improving productivity," said Arai. "With this technology our clinical staff will have more time to spend with patients."
The motivation behind the project came from a desire to better streamline clinicians' workflow while providing care to patients. Arai said that with a better workflow the hope is that clinical staff can redirect wasted effort spent toward finding equipment and focus it more on providing better care.
"When it came time to implement the RFID tags, we started with the hospital's infusion pumps," said Joel Cook, manager of Healthcare Solutions Marketing at AeroScout. "This equipment is very mobile, can break easily, and needs constant adjustment. We needed to tag them."
Hospital officials said that, once implemented, clinical staff would receive alerts regarding the status of equipment. This meant that if a piece of equipment was damaged, staff would be notified before it was needed at the point of care.
"All the users reported positive gains in their processes and we began discussions to use this technology to improve processes," said Arai. "As a result, we have a much better standard of care for patients. And as a by-product, equipment security has been improved as well."
During the first stages of implementation, said Ricardo Berrios, VP and general manager of AeroScout Latin America, there were a few barriers that had to be overcome – language barriers and different time zones being of top concern.
"The biggest challenge was the language barrier," said Berrios. "You need to do everything in their language. But after the first conversation with the CIO, we felt very comfortable with what we needed to do."
"The hospital had a large, state-of-the-art IT team and infrastructure," said Cook. The technological savvy of the IT department at the hospital made all the difference during the major phases of the project. "This hospital was right up there with the top hospitals in the US," said Cook.
