Patient Care

Consumables/Inventory Management

Preventative Maintenance

Staff Efficiency

Asset Tracking

TrackStar focuses on preventing medical errors in surgical procedures that currently cost the US health care industry more than 2 billion annually. Today surgical teams must rely on manual counting; this leaves enough room for errors causing large hospitals to experience about 2-4 cases annually of a surgical item being left inside a patient after surgery.

Surgery

Surgeons attach RFID tags to ensure that the correct operation is being performed on the right person and on the correct place of the body. Although such mistakes are rare, they do happen. Government studies estimate that 5-8 wrong site surgeries occur each month. The RFID tag gets encoded by medical staff with the patient’s name, medical record number and information about the type and site of the procedure and other relevant surgical instructions. The tags are placed on the patient’s skin near the surgical site. Before surgery begins, the tags are read by operating room staff with handheld readers to confirm the patient and procedure.

Additionally, RFID can track instruments and sponges used during surgical procedures to improve patient safety and decrease complex, time consuming counting procedures that are prone to human error. RFID helps surgical teams reduce the number of items left in patients during operations.

In a 2007 study published in the Journal of Surgical Research, 52% of retained surgical items were radiopaque sponges and 43% were instruments. Another study of RSI’s published in 2008 in the Annals of Surgery, reported 45% were sponges, 34% were instruments and 21% were needles.

TrackStar enables a count of items prior to surgery to ensure that post surgery, the surgical team can be confident that all instruments, sponges and needles were reconciled using RFID automation to increase safety and wellbeing of the patient while also increasing efficiency of the operating room logistics and workflow processes.

ED REVENUE RECOVERY

RFID and RTLS technologies ensure that all resources used for a patient’s well being are appropriately tracked and most importantly, allocated to the patient’s bill.

In the multibillion dollar health care industry, success hinges on the timely and error free delivery of medical procedures through a complex intensive care giving eco system. A failure of even the shortest duration anywhere along the ED organization can instantly ripple into a life or death situation. In this high stakes environment, proper attention to detail regarding what kind of resources were applied to which patient are mission critical for accurate billing of health care services. The paper based processes that are typically used are labor intensive, costly, present significant opportunity for error and often result in the very slow movement of information to key decision makers. Lack of information visibility can understate patient bills and their costs of service. ARS provides RFID and RTLS systems that automate record keeping requirements that can translate into revenue recovery for missing or incomplete emergency department patient bills.

STERILIZATION

The same tagging system can be used for the instruments to monitor and verify each step in a cleaning process. This would include:

• Ultrasonic cleaning – instruments can be verified that they were processed in a cleaner for the full recommended cycle time.
• Automatic wash sterilizers – adherence to manufacturer’s recommendations can be monitored.
• Manual cleaning – the name of the person performing the cleaning and inspection of the instrument can be stored in the tag memory to give a complete audit trail.
• Autoclaving – RFID can verify that the autoclave chamber is not overloaded and, therefore, avoid pockets that do not permit steam penetration.
• Cold sterilization – ensures the correct dwell time has been achieved for the instrument to be disinfected.