User Day
Forum 3: Healthcare

Do current and future data protection regulations restrict the use of technology in hospitals too much to implement security-enhancing and quality-enhancing solutions? The topic is highly relevant: A government draft is currently being proposed to amend the Federal Data Protection Act, which is meant to implement European law into national law by May 2018. This also has consequences for technology developers and users as well as employees and patients.

2,000 RFID reader, an integrated task management system, automated processes, connected services, tracking of all assets, employee tracking: The new university hospital puts Hospital 4.0 into practise and thus becomes the European pioneer for smart hospitals.

The Agaplesion Evangelisches Krankenhaus Holzminden is the starting point for a possible group-wide extension of tracking solutions for up to 25 hospital locations. The rollout in bed management has shown how mainly manual activities can be largely automated, thus increasing the efficiency of the process.

The ambitious goal of the managing board: Freezing the cost of the laundry management of the currently nine Berlin clinics of Vivantes at the level of 2010 – while increasing efficiency significantly at the same time. The solution: an RFID-based textile supply concept. Now, 99 percent of all 675,000 items of laundry are tracked via UHF RFID transponders with reading rate over 99,9 percent. Most importantly, Vivantes achieved its original goal: laundry costs have remained unchanged since 2012.

The aim is to bring technology providers and medical facilities together. A comprehensive networking of all stakeholders will enhance the innovation potential for automation and digitization in AutoID technology and healthcare significantly. Insitution-wide solutions benefit all: When hospitals and technology providers develop and implement business pilots together and present successful projects across the industry, the breakthrough in telemedicine and eHealth can be achieved.

Case cart logistics for medical products as well as CSSD products needs a complete solution with automatic monitoring of the OR, with the aim of greatly reducing material stock levels, while at the same time providing high availability for the planned operations. RFID is the technology of choice for tracking the carts. The structural planning and implementation of a holistic software solution for the provision of all surgical medical products and materials, including the instruments with the interfaces to the ERP and KIS software systems is the goal.

Wrocław’s Independent Clinical Public Hospital in Poland is testing innovative transport boxes with integrated temperature traceability based on NFC data loggers. Medical staff place temperature sensitive substances like cytostatic drugs to be transported inside isothermal boxes and are immediately able to keep track of temperature via an NFC reader placed on the side of the boxes. The products are delivered in about half an hour by medical vehicle to the individual customer in the hospital.

Only one pharmacist technician per medication tray, five minutes of stocktaking instead of 30 minutes, no more mislabelling or expired medications – NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital improves patient care and the safe distribution of medication with RFID. The hospital has increased patient safety since RFID enhances the stock accuracy to 100 percent. This helps to prevent the wrong medication being administered to patients. Due to the RFID solution, the hospital can produce more trays more frequently – up to 150 trays per day.

What are the benefits for a CSSD when all instruments are identifiable via RFID? Which processes can be optimised? And, above all: Will patient security and quality of care increase due to RFID use, while cost and obstacles are reduced? Oldenburg Hospital's CSSD can answer these questions with a clear, unequivocal “yes!”. Since the roll-out of the RFID based solution for instrument tracking, process transparency has increased noticeably.

The benefits of RFID technology for processing, testing, and sterilising within the Central sterile services department (CSSD) show in numerous roll-outs in hospitals across Germany. The next step: connecting processes between the use in the Operating Room (OR) and the CSSD. The presentation shows how these previously separated areas, use and processing data for instruments can be connected in a single healthcare IT application.