Recalled Products? Use RTLS to Find and Fix Them Faster
When a manufacturer issues a recall, how many hours do your biomed/clinical engineering professionals spend searching for the affected assets? RTLS offers a better way.
Think fast: A manufacturer notifies your hospital that one of its devices has been recalled. You have more than 300 of these medical assets in use throughout your facility.
How much time will your biomedical/clinical engineering personnel spend finding those devices?
How confident are you that recalled devices will NOT end up being used for patient care?
How much easier would it be if you could quickly find—and fix—recalled products through better healthcare asset tracking?
Responding to Recalls Should Be Fast and Efficient
For a hospital, manufacturer recalls can create a tremendous strain on clinical engineering resources. Failing to address a recall promptly and thoroughly can create risks to patient safety. When a recall occurs, the goal is always the same: to retrieve every piece of equipment in as little time as possible.
The classic response has been an all-hands effort of top-down rounding of every floor. But this approach is time consuming and extremely disruptive to workflow. It’s especially difficult when a hospital is already short staffed! Even when you have plenty of helping hands, there’s no guarantee of success in achieving a 100% “hit rate.”
In fact, recalled equipment can linger in the field unfound indefinitely.
How RTLS Enables ‘Total Recall’
Many hospitals have turned to Real-time Location System (RTLS) technology to significantly cut the time and effort required to locate and retrieve equipment. Custom fields in the software make it possible to track unique equipment properties—such as software builds, lot numbers and serial numbers—to quickly identify and retrieve impacted equipment.
With an RTLS asset management solution, you can find recalled equipment fast, ensuring a thorough remediation of issues.
Find Devices 100% of the Time
Saint Francis Medical Center spans 1.1 million square feet and employs just two full-time biomedical engineers. Using RTLS, Saint Francis has achieved 100% device remediation on 800+ devices. Knowing the device location and status has had a tremendous impact on the speed and efficiency of device collection. During these efforts, the technicians were able to find and remediate 100% of the affected infusion devices within the five-day contract period—which had never happened before. In addition, the team now completes drug library updates in just three weeks, which used to take a full year.
Read more about additional asset management advanced use cases.
