Real-time Tracking for Hospital Equipment

Busy hospitals transport hundreds of patients daily through different areas of the facility. From the emergency department to surgery to patient rooms, staff members use a wide variety of equipment to move and treat these patients.

As a result of all of this movement, vital equipment is often lost or misplaced, resulting in wasted time as staff members search for equipment. Hospitals may feel the financial impact, too, as items that cannot be found require ordering new supplies.

Scott Sullivan, department business officer for perioperative services, imaging and procedurals at the University of California San Diego Medical Center, discusses seven tips for tracking equipment that is commonly lost or misplaced at a busy hospital.

1. Understand the true usage of equipment in your department.

2. Tracking equipment will require a culture change, so be prepared.

3. Maintain a good tracking system so clinical staff can concentrate on patient care.

4. When using a location system, it is not necessary to track every piece of equipment.

5. Big ticket items are not necessarily the items you want to track.

6. Track items that may be used at multiple campuses.

7. To achieve maximum benefit, your RTLS deployment must have enterprise-wide coverage.

New cancer equipment at Santa Cruz

A multimillion dollar project is under way to upgrade radiation equipment that will be used to treat thousands of cancer patients in Santa Cruz County.

Santa Cruz Radiation Oncology is buying a state-of-the-art linear accelerator (http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?PG=linac)

The new accelerator, made by the Swedish company Elekta (www.elekta.com), costs $3 mil lion to $4 million. It will treat patients with electrons and photons, not just photons, and target multiple as well as single beams of radiation at cancer cells. Rather than using film that has to be developed, it will produce electronic images, speeding up treat ment.

The medical group's facility is the only one of its kind in the county, serving up to 60 patients a day, starting at 6:45 a.m.

Over a year, about 500 patients undergo two to eight weeks of radiation therapy, a component of cancer treatment that helps control the growth of tumors and improve survival rates.