Atlanta hospital completes RFID rollout

St. Joseph's Hospital in Atlanta is the latest acute-care facility to deploy radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track and locate its high-value assets. The 410-bed hospital, which has been around since 1880, has completed a rollout of the WaveMark CIMS hospital inventory management system to keep tabs on specialty equipment in the cardiac catheterization and electrophysiology labs. Hospital officials valued its movable products at $2 million, covering cardiac, neurologic, vascular, gastrointestinal, respiratory, orthopedic and oncology.

"I am able to pull a report of products expiring on any given day, in a matter of minutes, and quickly circulate to the labs for all expired products to be removed expeditiously," Chuck Naylor, the hospital's inventory and finance manager, says, according to a report in Healthcare IT News. "Normally this would involve a product by product review of every stent and balloon on the shelf. It will also reduce our chance of missing expired product to practically zero, obviously an important factor in maintaining the highest level of patient safety."

For more about this RFID installation:
- read this Healthcare IT News story

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