Does 2-D, 3-D or RFID
bleed red or green?
Experts discuss return
on investment for asset tracking tech
The healthcare
industry may be immersed in – and obsessed with – standardizing on
everything to control costs, but does it make sense to use
multidimensional bar coding or radiofrequency identification tags
for all people, processes and products?
Healthcare Purchasing
News asked key executives at more than a dozen companies that make
asset tracking products and technologies how a healthcare
organization might cost justify implementing 2-D/3-D bar coding or RFID/Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) technology for the gamut.
Matt Perkins,
Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Engineering, Awarepoint
Corp., San Diego
“Knowing the location of
equipment, patients and staff, as well as automatically being able
to monitor behaviors and processes brings so much value, especially
now that electronic health record adoption is surging. With RTLS,
all this accurate data can automatically populate the EHR in real
time to improve patient care and staff productivity. Efficient asset
management cuts equipment purchase and rental costs and improves
workflows to increase patient throughput – a plus for the quality of
care as well as the bottom line.
RTLS offers important
benefits and ROI that will amplify as the transition to more
patient-centered care accelerates and hospitals seek affordable,
easy-to-implement technologies to optimize their clinical,
operational and financial performance. Awarepoint has a proven track
record of saving our clients between $3 and $7 for each dollar
invested. Because we can deploy our solution within 60 days,
frequently our clients are cash flow positive before other
technologies are even live in the institution.”
Jonathan Karl,
Director, Sales,
CDW Healthcare Solutions,
Vernon Hills, IL
“Most hospitals will
look into an RFID solution for the purpose of tracking assets and
basic condition monitoring, but the costs of implementing an RFID
solution are usually beyond a customer’s budget when looking at the
short term impact and with more recent investments made in barcode.
From a 1-D versus 2-D bar code implementation standpoint, as
hospitals continue to implement EMR and PPID solutions, they may
change over from 1-D to 2-D bar-code scanners as an industry
standard or because it provides greater depth of information.
“There are clear
justifications for either investment, including increased patient
safety, clinical workflow improvement, and cost savings. Here are a
few benefits that result from these deployments:
-
Patient safety, in
terms of a reduction of medication errors. According to the U.S. DHHS, adverse drug events (ADE) are one of the largest safety issues
facing the industry today. Per the U.S. DHHS, there are more than
770,000 injuries and deaths per year as a result of a medication or
ADE
-
Clinical workflow improvement. Coupled with reducing errors, the
growth in mobile point-of-care enabling bedside medication and data
capture to the HIS application improves not only the accuracy but
the speed in which care can be provided to a patient. This further
reduces errors while improving the efficiency of the care provider.
-
Cost savings. [This] is achieved through reduction of errors, an
improved workflow and the alignment of internal systems. Deployment
of these platforms drives synergies between the pharmacies/labs all
the way to bedside care delivery, removing the additional logging
and checkpoints necessary when working with non-bar coded
medications or medical supplies.”
Shlomi
Avigdor, Director, Sales & Marketing,
LogiTag Systems Ltd., Mamaroneck, NY
“LogiTag envisions a
single platform that answers all RFID/RTLS needs of the hospital. To
justify its cost, RTLS must be capable of answering any hospital
wireless monitoring need – patient tracking, infant protection,
asset-tracking, temperature monitoring, wander prevention,
staff-attack panic buttons, nurse call, hygiene monitoring,
maintenance monitoring – using a single common infrastructure and
application-specific tags. With that, a hospital can justify the
CAPEX of installing the network, and gain savings in different
applications simply by using different tags. In addition, today’s
RTLS infrastructure is more mature and easier to install, relaying
more and more on wireless mesh networks and less on expensive and
labor intensive cables, thus reducing the installation’s cost.”
Fran
Dirksmeier, General Manager, Asset Management, GE Global Services,
GE
Healthcare, Waukesha, WI
“The real value stems
from leveraging real-time operational measurements, which in turn
can yield ongoing operational improvements. While the initial
deployment of RTLS may bear a significant upfront cost, we’re really
just scratching the surface in terms of aggregate value. When
evaluating RTLS applications, it’s important to look beyond simple
IV pump or other mobile asset tracking, and consider the broader
operational environment. This means broadening how healthcare
executives define the opportunity to include patient throughput, bed
management, and process compliance, to name a few.
“While improved asset
tracking alone can generate significant savings and productivity
gains, we’ve seen hospitals extend RTLS applications to improve bed
turnover time by over 60 minutes, reduce the decision-to-admit a
patient to bed placement by over 200 minutes, as well as double
compliance rates of staff processes like equipment cleaning. Now
suddenly, with these potential operational improvements, in addition
to the traditional gains of asset tracking, the justification of
implementing RTLS becomes greater.”
Arnold Chazal,
CEO, VUEMED Inc., Seattle
“If applied
appropriately, both 2-D bar coding and RFID/RTLS technology can be
valuable. However, the value of these technologies, as with any
technology, is realized based on how it’s implemented and used in
each specific context, rather than anything inherent in the
technology itself. Often the same objectives can be achieved through
process improvement and redesign, for example. Any organization
considering an investment in resource-intensive technologies should
ensure that they clearly identify how the technology will be used to
support the process and achieve the ultimate objectives. You have to
look at the whole picture and the entire cost, because such an
investment should not only improve the effectiveness of your
operations and the accuracy of your documentation and product
tracking, but it should also provide a significant return on your
investment annually.”
Marcus
Ruark, Vice President,
Intelligent InSites Inc., Fargo, ND
“A successful
enterprise-wide implementation of RTLS will have a positive
hard-dollar ROI and a rapid time-to-payback. As part of our RTLS+
process and methodology, we work with our customers to build a
rigorous ROI and benchmarking model, then provide ongoing
measurement and management, after implementation, to achieve or
exceed the predicted hard-dollar cost savings. It’s also worth
noting that, as I mentioned above, RFID and RTLS tag prices are
getting cheaper each and every year. We’ve designed our solution and
our platform’s architecture with the vision that tags will become
ubiquitous. The cheaper tags get, the more things will be tagged,
the more real-time data we will collect, the more processes we can
automate and optimize, and the greater the enterprise ROI.”
Kurt Mensch,
Principal Product Manager, RFID,
Intermec Inc., Everett, WA
“With some figures
showing typical hospital asset losses at $3,500 per patient bed per
year, implementing a traceability system that can help eliminate
loss, theft, wasteful rentals of redundant equipment due to lack of
knowledge of current item locations, and lost time searching for
critical items, a compelling ROI can certainly be calculated for an
effective and accountable asset tracking system.”
Richard
Philippe, president, Logi-D, New York, and Laval, Quebec, Canada
“Cost justification
must be at the forefront of any development project. As we wait for
standards to be finalized and rolled out to the industry, the cost
of delay should also be taken into consideration. The industry is
challenged with cost and resource pressures. It is widely predicted
that these pressures will not only continue, they will increase
exponentially as time goes on. In addition, back office processes in
many instances have been taken for granted, and available financial
resources have for the most part been invested in clinical
advancements. Given this environment, cost justification is actually
fairly easy. The key is to go beyond a unitary price transactional
analysis and conduct a thorough value analysis of the outcomes and
their payback.
“From a solutions
point of view, considering that the deployment of data standards is
still in its infancy, most tracking solutions currently implemented
are closed loops. Whenever closed- loop solutions are being sourced,
their capacity to migrate and read standard codes applied by
manufacturers when they become available, whether as bar codes or
RFID tags, should be considered.”
John
D’Ambrosio, Senior Manager, Core Team Lead — Supply Automation,
Omnicell
Inc., Mountain View, CA
“The key is to make
sure it benefits the organization as a whole and especially the
patient. If front line nurses can quickly realize how the change
will benefit their patients, they will embrace it. If the caregiver
cannot easily understand the patient’s benefit from the changes in
their workflow, they will view it as another task inappropriately
assigned to them that they will not adopt. The trick is to ensure it
simplifies the nurse’s daily routine and improves patient care.
Materials managers are programmed to define best practice and then
implement it across the board. We need to understand that there may
be multiple best practices within a hospital.
“Also, understanding
what and where to implement a solution is critical. Bar codes may
work great in one location and not so well in another. RFID could
easily be justified for interventional radiology but not be a great
fit for telemetry. Nursing will embrace the change if it’s the right
fit and they believe it will improve care. Delivering patient care
is the reason they went to school to receive a nursing
degree. Nurses and other caregivers think about patients the most,
and very little, if at all, about things like average daily usage,
fill rates and replenishment cycles. They were never educated to
think like an industrial engineer or a materials manager, and we
should not expect them to. They simply want product available to
ensure their patients are safe, well cared for and have the
opportunity to mend in a comfortable healing environment.”
Adam Peck,
Director, Marketing, CenTrak Inc. Newtown, PA
“The justification or
Return on Investment for a Real Time Location System is obvious. The
traditional value associated with more efficient management of
mobile medical equipment has been well documented – less over
procurement, lower rental expenses, reduction in equipment
shrinkage, higher nurse satisfaction. However, these savings pale in
comparison to the financial impact a high-performance RTLS can have
in other areas, including:
Tuomo
Rutanen, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Business Development,
Ekahau
Inc., Reston, VA
“Bar codes have
industry standards built-in. Some RTLS systems are not built around
open architectures and industry standards. True WIFI RTLS systems
can work over any 802.11 standard networks and can track any WiFi
tags over those networks.”
Dave
Stewart, Director, Healthcare,
Honeywell Scanning & Mobility, Fort Mill, SC
“When going through
the process of rolling out larger, more costly scanning
technologies, much of the decision revolves around both ROI and
preventing human error. 2-D and 3-D bar coding technology helps
doctors and healthcare professionals to avoid simple missteps.
Hospitals need to keep in mind that there is no single system that
works for all patients, medical devices, technologies and the supply
chains within hospitals. Bar coding works well for patient safety,
supply chain and specimen collection applications, whereas RTLS/RFID
technologies are better suited for other areas in the hospital, not
necessarily associated with the individual.”
Joel
Cook, Director, Healthcare Solutions, Stanley Healthcare Solutions/AeroScout,
Framingham, MA
“As the FDA continues
to push for Universal Device Identifiers, hospitals will inevitably
face higher accountability. More and more hospitals will turn to
bar coding and RFID solutions to effectively track patients, staff
and products to meet increasing regulations and compliance demands.”
Jon
Poshywak, Managing Director, RTLS Workflow Services,
TeleTracking,
Pittsburgh
“It is the desire and
requirement to standardize efforts that will ultimately justify
implementing 2-D/3-D bar coding and RTLS to track everything. These
technologies are proven to drive positive outcomes around staff
efficiency, asset utilization, reduction and/or elimination of lost
assets and supplies, and staff/patient safety and satisfaction.”
Henry
Tenarvitz, Chief [Intellectual Property] IP Officer,
Versus Technology Inc.,
Traverse City, MI
“The ROI for RTLS is
well-documented, especially when it comes to tracking assets. In
just one of many examples from our client base, Sacred Heart Medical
Center in Springfield, OR, estimates they saved $600,000 almost
immediately by simply being able to utilize their existing fleet of
IV pumps. Over the course of 10 years, they expect to save $2.7
million on pumps alone due to decreased leasing and purchasing.
“The ROI for using
RTLS for patient flow is somewhat harder to quantify, but is
nonetheless striking. A 2011 Emergency Physician Partners financial
analysis concluded that if just five patients per day leave an ED
without being seen, the hospital’s loss may be as high as $5 million
annually. After implementing Versus Advantages, Columbus Regional
Hospital reduced their left without being seen rate from 2.75
percent to less than 0.05 percent. Not only does this have direct
revenue implications, it also impacts patient satisfaction at a time
when HCAHPS scores are increasingly important.
“Complicating matters
in the Emergency Department, recent legislation eliminates diversion
as an option for most EDs. This means that patient overloads can
only be dealt with through improved patient flow management. What
other system can provide real-time situational awareness on the
pulse of your most chaotic, 24/7 environment? With RTLS, ED managers
and staff elevate their communication by simply viewing Versus
Glance-and-Go boards to know who is where, what stage a patient is
at, or which nurse or doctor is assigned to each patient. Our
customers are quoted as saying, ‘we can’t operate without the Versus
boards.’ It is communication collected by people simply wearing a
small badge, but it produces such huge transformational effects on
their workflows.
“In the OR, where
costs-per-minute can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars,
efficient patient flow and room turnover can significantly impact
revenue. One of the top-performing and high volume ambulatory
surgery centers in the nation, Northwest Michigan Surgery Center in
Traverse City, MI, recently implemented Versus’ RTLS and found they
could shave 5-10 minutes off the recovery time for each patient by
communicating the patient status via RTLS boards. When you multiply
that by the 18,000 patients they see per year, the cost savings are
significant.
“Even clinics can
benefit from RTLS. Canyon Park Clinic in Bothell, WA, doubled the
number of patients they see every month, from 3,000 to 6,000 by
using RTLS data to improve efficiency and increase patient flow. At
the same time, the clinic improved their customer satisfaction
scores, with 91 percent of their patients reporting an excellent
overall experience due in part to an efficient visit with little or
no ‘alone time.’”
Alicia Torres,
Global Practice Leader, Healthcare,
Zebra Technologies Corp., Lincolnshire,
IL
“At Zebra, we believe
every healthcare organization has an opportunity to achieve higher
levels of visibility.
“If implementation of
new technologies is solely based on cost, one of the most cost
effective solutions is 2-D barcodes. On the flip side, RFID or RTLS
solutions cannot be the only application standardized – or used – in
a medical setting.
“In a fully
integrated solution, there should be no priority for standardization
of bar coding over RFID or RTLS, or vise versa. These solutions will
complement each other in a medical setting, tracking different
assets from the supply chain to patient care.” |