Patient Flow Enewsletter
Volume 1, Issue 1
Thursday, December 11, 2003

Innovations
Achieving Better Patient Care with Supply Management Technology

In the near future, patients receiving trauma care at the Regional Medical Center at Memphis Emergency Department (the MED) may be quietly tracked using an emerging technology to find out exactly how they spend their time. Currently, the average trauma patient spends about fix-six hours in the Trauma ED receiving care, undergoing diagnostic procedures, and waiting, but current tracking methods can only account for three hours.

"By knowing where trauma patients are, we hope to achieve a better understanding of how and where patients are spending their time in the ED," says Dr. Brian Janz, who leads an interdisciplinary project team from the University of Memphis's FedEx Center for Supply Chain Management. "This knowledge should permit the staff at the MED to take corrective actions to better utilize hospital resources and to reduce patient wait times."

The University of Memphis faculty team has been working at the MED to ascertain the technical feasibility of using radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology to track trauma patients as they move through the trauma care process at the MED in hopes that the "missing time" of over five hours can be better accounted for.

RFID technology represents a step up from bar-coding technology. Dr. Janz hopes it will provide more "new knowledge" as compared to the more mature bar-coding technology. RFID technology represents a "passive" solution that should permit a more comprehensive and less obtrusive method of data collection when compared to the more traditional "active" process of manually scanning bar codes. The passive approach is believed to be superior in that hospital staff do not have to remember to scan the patient.

RFID tags - small integrated circuits with attached antennas - will be worn by patients on ankle bracelets. These tags will announce their location whenever they are in the proximity of a tag reader (several of which will be strategically located throughout the Trauma ED). These "announcements" can be collected to identify the specific tag and its respective location in the Trauma ED.

At this time, prototype RFID tags from Alien Technology have been tested and proven effective when secured to the human body in the form of an ankle bracelet.

"We hope, through activities made possible by the Urgent Matters demonstration grant, to show that RFID technology can be successfully integrated in the ED environment," said Dr. Janz. "Integration issues include not only technical issues, but also financial issues, such as whether the benefits justify the costs. In addition, the demonstration should help verify whether or not critical patient data can be collected in a passive manner, thus minimizing medical staff time."

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Brain Janz, Ph.D.
Associate Director for the FedEx Center for Supply Chain Management
FedEx Institute of Technology
Memphis, TN