As technology becomes a greater part of medication use processes across healthcare organizations, the need for a single global radio frequency identification (RFID) standard becomes increasingly clear.
UC Davis Health, a 653-bed multi-specialty academic medical center in Sacramento, California, has been repeatedly recognized by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) as “Most Wired,” or an organization that successfully applies technologies to clinical and business programs to improve healthcare delivery and outcomes. The pharmacy department is no exception and has adopted innovative radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions to increase the digital visibility of medications across the enterprise.
“Your health system, depending on its size, may be doing hundreds of code carts and hundreds of emergency kits each day. In the past, it required a lot of manual counting to make sure the necessary drugs were where they were expected to be,” said Ryan Cello, Pharmacy Manager, Automation, Informatics, Analytics & Diversion Detection at UC Davis Health.
To automate these tedious processes, UC Davis Health incorporated RFID into their anesthesia automated dispensing machines (ADMs), which allows the pharmacy team to have an up-to-date inventory of medications across the perioperative space. It also helps the pharmacy staff more easily replenish life-saving medication kits. RFID adoption, Cello said, has resulted in significant time savings while also helping to ensure that UC Davis Health providers always have what they need at the ready — and that patients are getting safe, accurate and effective medications at the bedside.
RFID solutions for the future
RFID has helped healthcare organizations like UC Davis Health solve multiple challenges, improving workflows and patient care through more streamlined medication use processes. Yet Cello said he is most excited for the next generation of ADM technologies, which will expand RFID capabilities even further. He is looking forward to new ADMs with RFID drawers embedded directly into the machines to support accurate medication counts in real time, as well as new systems that embed RFID readers to track patient-specific medications and controlled substances.
“There will even be, perhaps, an opportunity to have RFID tags tied to an order number that will automatically update the electronic medical record when a medication is put in a machine or taken out,” he added.
Cello’s team is also working with a robotics company to consider the feasibility of new robotic solutions automatically refilling the hospital’s ADMs, kits and trays. “It’s possible that this robotic solution could replenish trays overnight and then we could check them with the RFID reader to help take away the repetitive manual replenishment processes,” he said. “It would save us a lot of time and decrease redundant repetitive work.”
The need for standardization
As UC Davis Health considers investment in new medication management systems, each system must work with all medication products, including items pre-tagged by the manufacturer.
“Having a single, interoperable standard would make things much simpler and allow us to expand how we use RFID technologies in different ways,” he said. “I worry about future systems that are fragmented where you have one system that works with one type of tag, but you need a different system for other tags. If we continue that way, we’re just going to set ourselves up for failure.”
Cello hopes that pharmaceutical companies, ADM developers and other medication management solutions providers will come together and agree on a set RFID standard, like the GS1 RFID standard, that can be used with any system or solution — just as GS1 barcodes are used today. This will support the kind of interoperability to ensure a future where clinicians can work more efficiently with a high degree of accuracy — and where patient safety remains a top priority.
“More pharmacy teams need to work with RFID solution providers to share use cases and show them why standardization is important,” he said. “We need to continue pushing for interoperability and we need more influence from other organizations about their medication use processes to drive that message home.”
Article reposted with permission from Healthcare IT News.