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©2016 RFID Journal

Wayne HealtHCare is a 100-bed Hospital that hasbeen serving the Greenville, Ohio, community for nearly100 years. The facility employs more than 175 doctors,nurses and clinicians and has a 400-person support staffand hundreds of volunteers. But with a seven-person ITdepartment, Wayne HealthCare had to outsource itsannual inventory of IT assets, including computers,monitors, printers, networking equipment and peripher-als. The inventory is required as part of a systems securityaudit. Each year, it took four contracted workers threedays to inventory the 3,400-plus IT assets spread acrossthe six buildings comprising the Greenville campus.

In 2013, Shelton Monger, Wayne HealthCare’s chiefinformation and corporate compliance officer, began

looking for a way to reducethe time and cost of conduct-ing the inventory counts.Having spent 28 years in theU.S. Air Force, in both activeand contract duty, duringwhich RFID was widely usedfor asset management,Monger was quite familiarwith the technology and itsbenefits. Based on his AirForce experience, he wasconfident that using RFID to

manage the hospital’s IT assets would deliver a quickreturn on investment. As a member of the hospital’ssenior leadership team, he had budget control and theautonomy to allocate funds for the deployment.

In 2014, Wayne HealthCare deployed an RFID asset-

management solution. The project delivered an ROIwithin a year—and that inspired Monger to considerhow the technology could improve other hospital oper-ations. One area in which he thought RFID could havean impact was on patient care. Wayne HealthCare’s five-to-one patient-nurse ratio reflects its strong commit-ment to patient satisfaction.

The hospital performs approximately 10 surgeriesdaily in its Ambulatory Care Center, though on somedays it can perform more than 20 procedures. Familymembers or friends typically remain in the waitingroom while a procedure is taking place, and they fre-quently ask the one staff member who manages thewaiting room about their loved ones’ status.

Monger knew that keeping family membersinformed was very important to patient satisfaction,but it was difficult for one person to obtain frequent

Community Hospital Finds RFIDIs a Good FitWayne HealthCare uses the technology to lower the cost ofmanaging IT assets and improve patient services.By Lauren S. Roman

rfidjournal.com |August 07, 2016

Wayne HealthCare is lowering the cost of managing its ITassets with RFID, as well as improving its patient services.

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Shelton Monger

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RFID Journal: Community Hospital Finds RFID Is a Good Fit

updates—whether a patient was waiting for a procedureto begin, was in an operating room or had been movedto the recovery room—and respond in a timely manner.The hospital required a more effective way to communi-cate patient status to loved ones.

In 2015, Wayne HealthCare implemented an RFIDpatient-tracking system. “Keeping patients informed ispart of our commitment to excellence in the patientexperience” Monger says.

Managing AssetsWhile many larger hospitals with more resources arereluctant to invest in a relatively new technology,Monger saw things differently because, he says, heunderstood the value of RFID. He contacted Evanhoe &Associates, a full-service IT solutions provider and sys-tems integrator in neighboring Dayton, Ohio. Mongerwas familiar with the firm from his work in the AirForce, and for more than a decade, he served with thecompany’s founder, Chuck Evanhoe, on a neighborhoodassociation board of trustees. Evanhoe also is chairmanof AIM.

Since the project’s goal was to inventory assets,Evanhoe recommended identifying items with passiveultrahigh-frequency RFID tags and using handheldreaders, which would reduce system costs. The assetsare identified via Omni-ID tags—the Flex (a labeldesigned for tracking laptops and other office equip-ment), the IQ400P (a small label for plastic and non-metal items) and the Prox-NG (a small tag for IT assets).

One of Monger’s staff members spent roughly 120days RFID-tagging all of the IT assets, as well as newitems as they arrived.

The hospital only needed to purchase a single AlienTechnology 9011 handheld reader. The reader captureseach tag’s unique identification number and transmits

that data via the hospital’s Wi-Fi network to theFluensee AssetTrack (now called Track-X) software,which runs on a local server. The software has a man-agement dashboard to monitor assets and providereports, including those needed to comply with theannual audit.

It now takes one employee less than two days to con-duct the annual audit, Monger reports. “The techniciansimply enters each room, and the reader picks up every-thing that’s in the room,” he says. “No line-of-sight isrequired. It’s no longer the incredible chore it oncewas.”

In addition, Monger says, “Now that we know whereassets are, usage is up significantly.” In the past, heexplains, some assets were hidden from view or movedfrom one department to another. Not having to replacethings that were “lost,” he says, is a significant benefit.

Monitoring PatientsThe Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services requires that all U.S. hospitals conduct patient-satisfac-tion surveys. Wayne HealthCare always scored well onthese surveys, but continuous improvement hasremained a priority for the hospital. Not all purchasingdecisions at Wayne HealthCare are made solely on thebasis of ROI, Monger notes, adding that the decision toinvest in a patient-tracking solution was driven by thedesire and need to satisfy patients.

To explore how to keep patients’ families and friendsbetter informed regarding their surgical status, Mongerconvened an interdisciplinary team, with members fromIT, perioperative services (surgical staff), nursing andfacilities. Evanhoe also consulted on the project. The teamdetermined that a primary consideration was to accom-modate the existing surgical processes without changes.

Developing a solution appropriately scaled for the

Above: the hospital installed a console in the waiting roomthat displays patient status. Right: small Prox-NG tags areused for managing IT assets.

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RFID Journal: Community Hospital Finds RFID Is a Good Fit

size and needs of Wayne HealthCare’s ambulatory sur-gical center was the initial challenge, Evanhoe recalls. Apassive RFID system would be most cost-effective, hesays, but tracking individuals via passive RFID is diffi-cult since the radio waves do not pass through or end upbeing reflected by the human body. Tag selection andplacement were important and required a lot of trial anderror. “We had a great partner with Wayne,” he states.“They worked with us to understand the processes, lim-itations and desired outcomes.”

The team first tried tracking patients with RFID-enabled wristbands. But with the passive tag in thewristband so close to the skin, and the antenna in theceiling located up to 15 feet away, they could not obtainconsistent and reliable reads. They decided that, with anaverage of 10 patient beds circulating the unit each day,tracking beds would be the most effective approach.

To identify the beds, Repacorp custom-designedAlien Technology ALN-9728 EPC Gen 2 passive UHFRFID tags. Each tag has a perforated section with apatient ID number that can be torn off and handed tofamily members. The portion that remains is insertedinto a sleeve affixed to the end of the patient’s bed.Evanhoe supplies the tags pre-printed with uniquepatient-identification numbers.

Four Alien ALR9900+ fixed readers and six Alien ALR8696C antennas were installed beneath ceiling tiles inthe Ambulatory Care Center: at the ingress and egressdoorways of the pre-op/post-op area, procedural room,operating room suite, recovery room, inpatiententrance/exit and OR rear entrance/exit. The systemwas designed to require only one antenna per doorway,since direction is indicated by the last location read.

Evanhoe custom-designed a software platform and aJava application using an MS SQL database. WayneHealthCare installed a console in the waiting room thatdisplays patient status. Patients are identified by theirID number to maintain privacy.

“The system is designed to be self-sufficient,” saysAngie Lakes, a registered nurse and Wayne HealthCare’sdirector of perioperative services. “We put the tag on thebed, share the number with the family in order to main-tain anonymity in the waiting area, and the systemtakes care of itself. The patient tracking is appreciatedby the families of our surgical patients and even comesup as a positive factor in patient experience surveys.”

It took roughly a year to develop, test and implementthe patient-tracking solution, Monger says. Now thatit’s boosting patient satisfaction, he plans to determineif it can deliver additional benefits, such as improvingworkflows by examining the amount of time patientsspend in each step of the process.

Monger believes all hospitals, no matter their size,can benefit from RFID. “Literally, there is nothing not tolike about the systems,” he says. “They are better for ourstaff, better for our patients and better for our bottomline. We’re proud to be pioneers at the community hos-pital level and expect we’ll find other uses for AIDC[automatic identification and data capture] in the nearfuture.”

Lauren S. Roman is managing director ofTransparentPlanet, which provides AIDC companies with new strategies for promoting and growing their businesses.

Left: Flex labels monitor laptops and other office equipment. Above: AlienTechnology ALN-9728 tags identify beds.