Healthcare administrators have enough to worry about when it comes to ensuring that patients receive the highest caliber of medical services available. However, they also need to prevent the loss of costly medical supplies, pharmaceutical drugs and expensive medical apparatuses and machinery.
It’s easy to see how something can get lost or misplaced when you consider the many things inside a hospital and the way they’re used by different professionals in different locations. Even worse, when it’s a medical sample – like a spinal tap that’s expensive and dangerous to extract or a time-sensitive sample that could save someone’s life if processed quickly enough – misplacing the item could spell disaster for the patient involved.
Fortunately, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology can solve many of the challenges associated with loss at large hospitals, but there are a lot of different options when it comes to RFID systems. How do you evaluate a potential new inventory tracking software to make sure it’ll meet your needs?
A Checklist for RFID Healthcare Technology
When evaluating an RFID technology healthcare system, healthcare administrators should look for specific features that now come standard in modern RFID technology. At the very least, here’s what your RFID system should include:
- Real-time tracking: Keeping track of statistics related to drug inventories, medical devices and lab samples is vital to ensuring that medical personnel have all the materials they need to provide the best medical treatment possible. Tracking these items individually will also ensure that nothing gets lost, so that every medical sample and every device can be found at a moment’s notice, exactly when it’s needed.
- Customizable software: The features and tools in any healthcare inventory tracking software need to be customizable to meet the unique requirements of your facility, while also being rock-solid and reliable. The best RFID tracking systems should also integrate into your existing systems and run on a variety of platforms to make deployment as simple as possible. For example, the best solutions shouldn’t only track RFID-enabled items, but should also work with barcode technology, which is still essential to most hospitals.
- Improved data security and patient safety: These days, the security of patient information is vital to keeping patients safe from identity theft and other kinds of fraud. Modern RFID systems are therefore equipped with safeguards to ensure the security of patient data. Reliably tracking items and pharmaceuticals within a healthcare facility also prevents the loss of vital data that could result in harmful medical errors and other dangerous hospital mistakes.
- Improved chain of custody: Hospitals need to make sure that every biological sample is under the control and protection of a person who is legally responsible for the sample and capable of being in its care. Chain of custody accuracy is perfected with modern RFID technology, allowing hospital staff to see who has handled a medical sample or piece of equipment, when they used it, and where it’s now located. This not only increases safety and inventory accuracy, it also improves staff accountability.
- Reduced operational costs: Loss of biological samples, medical devices, medical machinery and pharmaceutical drugs result in massive financial costs to hospitals every year. Because of the way RFID dramatically reduces loss and labor associated with keeping track of objects inside a hospital, the most advanced RFID systems will always allow for massive operational cost savings for the medical facilities that implement them.
PortalTrack Inventory Tracking Software Offers These Benefits and More
PortalTrack from MSM Solutions is the leader of the pack when it comes to modern advances in RFID inventory tracking software. It is a highly customizable solution that uses cloud-based and Internet of Things architecture to work with a variety of host systems and the latest RFID hardware. It provides all types of medical facilities with on-demand inventory visibility and cost savings. Best of all, it comes with MSM Solutions’ stellar technical support.
To see how PortalTrack is already delivering results to the healthcare industry in the real world, check out this Green Dental Laboratories case study. With the help of MSM Solutions, Green Dental’s director of information management was able to update the laboratory’s tracking system with the latest RFID technology, leading to unprecedented levels of business, streamlined operational procedures, reduced costs and increased profits.
