Top Hospital Gain Intelligent Control of Linens and Uniforms - IIoT and RFID - Improve Tracking, Workflows, and Safety by SmartX HUB

HOSPITAL SMART LINENS TRACKING

Latin America Hospital Maintains Strict Hygiene and Reduces Waste with Garments Tracking

Customer: Top 3 -Latin America Hospital

Today, the Client is at the forefront of important projects, which shows how the public-private partnership can yield fruits for the community, inspiring other institutions to join in for the health of Brazil. The Client’s skills and knowledge are at the service not only of patients of its own eight units, but also in more than two dozen locations in Brazil, and around the world.

In the city of São Paulo alone, the Client operates 22 public units – always with the highest quality.

Challenge

Our Client needed better visibility into the location of textile assets, especially as assets moved around the hospital and external laundries. With a large number of items used across multiple rooms and OR, the Client needed a way to maintain and track each item automatically.

Manually processing laundry items is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task that adds operational costs for laundry operators. It also is error-prone, potentially leading to item loss and increased costs for replacement of missing items. In addition, handling soiled hospital laundry risks exposing staff to infectious disease.

Additionally, the hospital staff replaced items they thought they had lost when they were actually in an unexpected part of the hospital, leading to unnecessary expenses.

By implementing a RAIN RFID solution built on the SmartX HUB cloud platform, the customer wanted to increase the visibility of all tagged textile assets throughout the building and the solution must follow the guidelines below:

More efficient tracking of assets using RFID Portals on strategic corridors and doorways.
Increase speed and accuracy of item counting
Scalable across other 150.000 textiles and uniforms within the building and laundry service providers.
Reduce physical handling of soiled laundry to improve infection control
Reduce Purchase and carry additional assets
Automatic get arrival and departure records
Reduce the labor and/or hours associated with inventorying, tracking and managing the assets
Reduce costs with laundry loss prevention

Solution - SmartX HUB - Production and Delivery Control Systems

The SmartX HUB uniform management system provides a simple solution for eliminating uniform shortages by allowing us to track, sort, wash, and repair garments accurately.

The solution combines high-performance washable and durable RFID laundry tags, along with handheld and Cabinet reader systems to capture item data.

It enables laundry services to quickly and safely count laundry items, improving efficiency, reducing errors, and lowering costs.

When caregivers check out an item, it is associated with that asset’s unique tag chip. Readers scan each tag chip as the asset moves throughout the facility so Hospital staff can instantly locate the asset.

Asset movements are stored and presented in real-time making it easy to identify items that leave the hospital's facilities without permission, and preventing possible asset loss.

Benefits

With the SmartX HUB Platform, the hospital laundering processes gain visibility and control of linens and uniforms throughout their lifecycle. Operations staff can easily track the real-time location of each item, virtually eliminating loss and associated replacement costs.

By closely accounting for textile inventory, laundering services can make more precise purchasing decisions and avoid the cost of over-stocking to offset shortages.

Annual time savings due to reduced search needs:

Previously, locating items throughout the multiple wings of the hospital took days. Nurses spent an average of 30 minutes per day looking for equipment. With increased inventory accuracy and the real-time location system, items are now located within seconds. Not only are items located faster, but the history of each item is now readily available, creating a safer patient environment.

Decreased overall inventory needs:

Increased visibility and fewer lost assets led to improved asset utilization. Having a full picture of all of their items, the hospital realized they had more assets than they needed. With this new picture into their inventory, they were able to decrease overall inventory by identifying two redundant products, saving significant costs.

Making reusable competitive with disposable:

By improving the processes behind isolation gown management, this solution makes sorting linens and tracking the number of uses more straightforward and accurate. This process improvement makes reusable linens a viable option compared to disposable textile assets, helping hospitals save money and reduce waste.

Streamline workflow with increased automation:

RFID technology counts laundry items automatically, increasing both the speed and accuracy of accounting for inventory. The staff has more time for value-added activities such as running clean and efficient laundry operations and hospital logistics service.

Gain visibility and control to prevent item losses, reduce costs:

Conclusion

Using the SmartX HUB Textile Track solution, the most important Hospital in Latin America was able to automate gown tracking, easily pull gowns from service at the end of life, and speed up the inspection and packaging processes. Using RFID tags and readers with the SmartX HUB RFID solution, the Hospital now ships an average of 10,000 reusable textile assets per day and tracks 150,000 linens and uniforms in circulation.

Each gown has an RFID tag providing an associated, unique ID number added at the original intake
Once used, each gown is sent out to be cleaned and tracked as they arrive at the Hospital receiving
Gowns are laundered, sorted, and bundled for hospital delivery - tracking each gown as it is moved
Once linen reaches maximum allowable cycles, the linen is destroyed
Linens are tracked at all transition points using +10 RFID readers

Intelligent asset management

supply chain automation

Worker health and Safety

asset management

security

Sensor monitoring

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RTLS Fundamentals

HOSPITAL SMART LINENS TRACKING

Customer: Top 3 -Latin America Hospital

Challenge

Solution - SmartX HUB - Production and Delivery Control Systems

Benefits

Annual time savings due to reduced search needs:

Decreased overall inventory needs:

Making reusable competitive with disposable:

Streamline workflow with increased automation:

Gain visibility and control to prevent item losses, reduce costs:

Conclusion

Benefits

Accurate Inventory

Maintaining Hygiene

Reducing auditing time

Automatically locate assets

Extend the life of your assets

Enforcing accountability

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800-298 5227