A recent article by Drug Topics addresses the benefits of using RFID for hospital medication replenishment.
The article titled "Hospitals Turn to RFID for Medication Replenishment," highlights how hospital pharmacies are using RFID to eliminate human error and automate the time-consuming and inefficient task of replenishing medication on crash carts.
Pharmacy Operations Managers who have adopted the Intelliguard® RFID Kit and Tray Management System for pharmacy automation discuss their experiences in this article.
RFID System Inventories and Highlights Medication Expiration Rates in Less Than One Minute
Arpit Mehta, PharmD, MPH, Pharmacy Operations Manager at Inova Fairfax Medical Campus in Falls Church, VA, describes how their RFID system, implemented earlier this year,
"...prints a detailed report list of all the meds and all the expiration dates. It highlights the earliest expiration dates and the whole process takes less than one minute."
The Intelliguard® RFID inventory management system eliminates the need for item-level scanning or manual counting. Advanced RFID technology automates the tray replenishment process, scanning more than 150 medications in a matter of seconds to ensure inventories are always complete and accurate.
>> See Time Is a Precious Commodity for Processing Medication Kits and Trays
>> See January’s First Major Nationwide Drug Recall
RFID Inventory Management System Means that Pharmacists Can Be More Productive
Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego uses the Intelliguard® RFID system for medications on OR trays, emergency drug trays and intubation trays. Quynh Vu, PharmD, BCPS, Inpatient Pharmacy Manager, noted that their RFID system, which they have been using for two years, has increased productivity.
"It's much more efficient and it has allowed pharmacists to focus on other areas, like dispensing new meds orders."
From Crash Carts to Anesthesia Trays, RFID provides benefits
As the article states about the RFID process,
... "(it) helps to eliminate the error-prone human factor associated with manually checking the trays."
Read the full Drug Topics article to learn more about how RFID technology has proven its value in medication-kit filling of crash carts and anesthesia trays.
Learn More About Reducing the Risk of Human Error with RFID
The Intelliguard® Kit and Tray Management System is proven to save staff time and provides assurance each task is performed with 100% accuracy—nothing missing, nothing expired.
>> See The Growing Problem of Medical Errors and the Role of RFID in Helping to Reduce Them
To learn more about reducing the risk of human error with RFID, download the "Risk of Relying on Human Perfection" white paper. It focuses specifically on the human reliability challenges of procedural and emergency kit and tray processing in the inpatient pharmacy. It also explores the use of advanced RFID technology to automate, validate and ease the process to reduce the occurrence of human errors.
It refers to a quality improvement study detailing how manual replenishment processes led to one in 3-5 trays leaving the hospital pharmacy with one or more errors. In contrast, by using an RFID-enabled process, 100% of trays were accurate with nothing missing and nothing expired.
Is your hospital pharmacy ready to implement RFID for hospital medication replenishment? Let us know.
