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Can RFID Ease the Healthcare Staffing Shortage?

Can RFID Ease the Healthcare Staffing Shortage?

“Sorry, we have a staffing shortage,” are not the words you want to hear in a healthcare setting. It’s no secret that the pandemic burned out healthcare workers at an extraordinary rate, and hospitals are experiencing an unprecedented HR crisis. Filling the vacancies will take years while new doctors and nurses are trained. But in the meantime, the quality of patient care is suffering, and healthcare needs – yours or a loved one’s – won’t wait.

Some healthcare experts are advocating for a flex-work approach similar to the hybrid workplace many offices have recently instituted. Allowing nurses to work shorter shifts, and to choose those shifts when possible, is already showing promise as a way to retain skilled staff by accommodating a life-work balance.

Technology, too, shows a path toward better patient care with fewer staff. The healthcare sector is already heavily invested in advanced technology, from robotic surgery to electronic medical records (EMR). RFID technology is found in many healthcare settings, where its data-collection capabilities are helping to keep track of pharmaceutical and equipment assets.

RFID tags and readers instantly deliver the answers to important healthcare queries.

  • What is it? An RFID tag includes the name of a drug or piece of equipment, the manufacturer’s name, an inventory control number, and other identifying information.
  • How many are there? Tags provide a complete, accurate, and fast count of supplies, to avoid shortages.
  • Where is it? RFID-tagged equipment and personnel can be tracked in real time moving through a hospital.
  • When does it expire? RFID labels include this information; it’s especially important for patient safety, and to avoid wasting expensive drugs that weren’t rotated into use before their expiry date.

As you might imagine, finding these answers manually can be extremely time-consuming, involving multiple healthcare professionals whose time is better spent caring for patients. No one wants to see nurses running through the halls looking for a surgeon or a crash cart.

Moreover, RFID-enabled patient wristbands reduce care errors. Patients’ identities can be confirmed, their treatment plans updated, and their EMR records accessed via RFID and interoperable medical technology.

RFID saves time, reduces errors, and lets healthcare workers devote their time to patient care rather than managing supplies and equipment. It won’t solve the staffing crisis on its own, but there’s no question that it is a vital part of the healthcare personnel solution.

 

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Too Much Inventory? Better Knowledge Will Reduce Over-Buying

Too Much Inventory? Better Knowledge Will Reduce Over-Buying

Even in the midst of this inflationary period, you’ve probably seen an abundance of “on sale” advertising lately. Retailers are reducing their inventories of everything from printer paper to washer/dryers. Beginning in 2020, businesses large and small stocked up, hoping to manage supply chain uncertainties. Now they’re in an over-buying situation, riding the inventory boom-bust roller coaster as they try to balance supply and demand while inflation works its way through the economy.

Inventory management is 50% a knowledge game and 50% a guessing game. You may know what you have in stock. You may know the supply levels needed to maintain uninterrupted operations. You may know what the historic demand has been. But you have to make an educated guess at the future supply and the future demand. That’s where things get tricky. In uncertain times, you may find yourself over-buying “just in case.”

Excess inventory ties up a lot of cash. Inflation demands a lot of cash. Before turning to external funding from banks and investors, businesses are searching for internal sources of cash. Inventory reduction is one cash source, and yet it’s risky to reduce inventory while the economy is still in flux.

Better knowledge reduces the uncertainty. The better your inventory knowledge is, the better your guesses about your future inventory needs. Acquiring better knowledge, however, can be costly in terms of time and labor, just at a time when you’re hoping to spend less cash. This is the inventory management conundrum.

RFID is the answer. Better inventory knowledge is more than just having an accurate count of stock on hand and a sales or usage count over a week or a month. Better inventory knowledge means getting information in real time, on demand. Better inventory knowledge lets you make decisions ahead of a supply crisis, or respond quickly to other movements in your entire supply chain.

Better inventory knowledge gives you a competitive advantage.

The 19th century Rothschild banking fortune was established when the family used carrier pigeons to get information about events that influenced the economy – information that no one else had in those pre-telegraph days. The Rothschilds had better knowledge. They didn’t have to guess about the future.

RFID does the same thing for businesses today. With a combination of handheld and doorway readers, RFID allows you to have continuous polling. Warehouse inventories are updated in real time. You have better inventory knowledge. No other inventory information system delivers inventory data faster, as this video shows. Get better knowledge from RFID and avoid the cost of over-buying.

 

Photo © dusanpetkovic1 / AdobeStock

Are Your Business Assets Past Their Sell-By Date?

Are Your Business Assets Past Their Sell-By Date?

Food producers are careful to include a conservative sell-by date on the products they sell. Everyone benefits; consumers aren’t disappointed or harmed by spoiled foods, and producers ensure their products live up to their brand.

The sell-by date isn’t confined to groceries, however. Every business has assets that eventually hit a critical date. Locating those assets and taking action by those dates can be labor-intensive and costly.

Labor-intensive and costly, that is, unless your business uses RFID for asset management. RFID technology is much more than a fancy inventory identification system. RFID chips can be programmed to contain all kinds of data about an object: when it was made, when it was put into service, when it needs maintenance, what kind of service it needs, when it should be replaced, and much more.

When queried, RFID software can generate a report about upcoming critical dates, sorted by asset type, or location, or required action. Imagine the amount of time and money saved by automatically tracking an asset’s location and critical dates.

This benefit applies in dozens of industry sectors. A few examples:

  • Food service – suppliers add RFID tags to boxes of perishables, so distributors and restaurants stay on top of freshness deadlines. Chipotle Restaurants is testing this technique in their Chicago restaurants’ supply chain.
  • Pharmaceuticals – RFID tags prevent the use of expired drugs. Pennsylvania’s Reading Hospital is tracking Covid vaccine expiration dates and times with RFID technology, to prevent waste of the vital and costly medication.
  • Business electronic devices – RFID tags attached to laptops, mobile phones, tablets, and copiers are routinely queried by the IT department to determine when they are due for maintenance. An additional query signals each device’s location, on site or off. The U.S. Army is using RFID to track the whereabouts of their office electronic devices and provide routine updates and maintenance.

Almost every business asset has a “sell-by” date of some kind. Furnishings eventually have to be replaced. Outdated computers have to be disposed of. Obsolete law books, old patient files, tax returns from the time of the dinosaurs – whatever they are, they have to go sooner or later. Know where they are, and know when their time is up, with RFID.

 

Photo © Iriana Shiyan / AdobeStock

I’ll Have an RFID Tag and a Beer, Please

I’ll Have an RFID Tag and a Beer, Please

The craft beer business is booming. Small regional brewers and local micro-breweries supply unique local beers to nearby bars and restaurants, accounting for nearly 24% of beer consumption in 2020. Post-covid, many bars and restaurants have been short-staffed and patrons have stayed away rather than endure long waits for service. In response, some creative pub owners have turned to RFID technology to help get beer into patrons’ glasses.

The use of RFID in self-serve beer pubs is not entirely new, but it’s expanding rapidly as a way to help with hospitality staffing challenges. Patrons are issued an RFID wristband that records their driver’s license information and payment card, and the self-serve “beer wall” records their purchases. The benefits include:

  • Reduced liability – The system places automatic limits on patrons’ consumption and prevents underage self-service.
  • Better marketing management – Buying habits are tracked based on age group, day of the week, etc., to match popular products with outreach efforts.
  • Improved inventory management – Real-time inventory reports help avoid shortages and lost sales.

It should be noted that these RFID benefits are not limited to the hospitality industry. Inventory management has been a strength of RFID for decades, but inventive users keep coming up with new ways to use RFID as an operational solution:

  • Life Sciences – Researchers identify and track samples throughout the testing process, preventing errors that could skew results.
  • Healthcare – Equipment and drug inventories are continuously monitored, and personnel are tracked throughout hospital complexes, ensuring adequate numbers of staff and materials.
  • Administrative Offices – Paper documents are tracked as they move from desk to desk, avoiding misplacement or erroneous deliveries.

At its most basic, RFID may be thought of as an inventory management tool, but as these applications show, it is really much more. It frees employees to focus on their primary tasks as it automatically tracks and counts operational items of all kinds. It saves the hours that would otherwise go to correcting errors. And it will even dispense a beer for you at the end of a long workday. Cheers to that!

Photo © WavebreakmediaMicro / AdobeStock

Practicing Lean? How RFID Fits Into a Good Process

Practicing Lean? How RFID Fits Into a Good Process

Whether you’re managing life sciences research, product manufacturing, or a professional-services practice, process is at the heart of any successful business operation.

Waste and inefficiency inevitably lead to a downward spiral in profits, as proponents of Lean and Six Sigma have said for years. Some experts cite studies showing:

  • Teams spend almost 30% of their time on finding data and doing menial tasks rather than conducting analysis.
  • 64% of a sales rep’s counted hours are spent doing things that don’t contribute to the company’s bottom line.
  • 50% of companies also spend between $5 to $25 on manually processed invoices.

Improving processes is one of the keys to enhanced earnings. Writing in Industry Week, Jason Piatt outlines 6 criteria that go into a “good” process – one that improves operations, productivity, and throughput. Not surprisingly, RFID fits into each of these six criteria:

  1. A good process should be simple, to avoid opportunities for error. RFID tags and doorway or handheld RFID readers provide easy and error-free tracking and inventories.
  2. A good process should be robust, ready to handle unexpected environmental or emergency situations. RFID tags withstand extreme temperatures and can assist in emergency locational tracking of products and personnel.
  3. A good process should be documented to maintain accuracy and information integrity. RFID systems output periodic reports providing confirmation of other system’s documentation, such as ERP and MISys.
  4. A good process should be controlled so activities are repetitive and identical. RFID systems can be polled on a set schedule, conducted the same way every time, so areas of improvement can be identified.
  5. A good process should be communicated among all parties up and down the line. RFID’s data can easily be shared among other systems and reported to stakeholders, adding transparency and accountability to the process.
  6. A good process is error-proofed, with safeguards for novice-user mistakes. Because an RFID system is simple to use, it protects against the errors typically found in manual inventories and tracking.

Process is not merely a step-by-step series of activities. It is a deliberately designed sequence leading to delivery. A good process is flexible and test-able. It builds on test results to yield continuous improvements. Incorporate RFID into your operational process and move toward a good process.

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