Infection control officers in hospitals have a daunting task – prevention and containment of infectious diseases is crucial for both patients and staff.
As a healthcare safety professional, management of medical equipment that falls within the Joint Commission Environment of Care guidelines are within your responsibilities. Making sure equipment is both available and working properly are part of your department’s goals.
Challenge:
Infection Prevention and Control Challenges: Despite progress, infections continue to develop in hospitalized patients, and may also affect hospital staff. Everyone must work cooperatively to reduce the risk. This includes caregivers, administrators and support staff (housekeeping, transport, central sterilization, maintenance). Infection control programs are most effective when they are comprehensive and include both surveillance and prevention activities.
Equipment Safety Challenges: A critical asset recall can severely impact patient care and safety. When a recall notice is received, hospital staff must immediately locate the device or devices to remove them from operation or conduct the required safety adjustment. In addition, Biomedical assets must be maintained in a manner that complies with manufacturer’s recommendations, and Joint Commission and other regulatory agency requirements. Failure to consistently comply may result in unnecessary risk resulting from malfunctioning equipment or lack of an adequate supply of clean, working equipment for patient care.
RTLS Benefit:
As an infection control and containment tool, Awarepoint® enables you track equipment, patients and personnel in order to identify the people and items with which each has come in contact, establish decontamination and sterile processing workflows, alert on deviations, automatically record caregiver rounding and provide exception reporting on your established hand-washing initiatives.
From an equipment management perspective, staff must rapidly respond to asset recalls and consistently achieve preventive maintenance completion rates. Of course, you must be able to actually find your equipment to achieve this. Awarepoint provides the real-time location and status of mobile medical equipment assets enterprise-wide. Search options allow locating an individual asset, a class of assets, assets by specific location (floor, area, room) or unique asset identifier (department owner, type, manufacturer, model number, asset control number or EIN).
RTLS Impact:
RTLS equipment, patient and personnel tracking enables hospitals to document and identify the people and items with which the patient has come in contact, establish and alert against decontamination and sterile processing workflows, automatically record caregiver rounding, and monitor trends to provide incidence reporting on hand-washing workflow exceptions.
RTLS can significantly improve PM completion rates by providing date-specific alerting of preventative maintenance due dates and pinpointing the specific location of the asset anywhere in the facility. When a recall notice is received, RTLS pinpoints the specific location of the recalled asset(s) anywhere in the facility, assuring maximum response time.
Learn More:
Take Action. We offer hospitals a free RTLS Impact Analysis to identify positive financial and clinical outcomes specific to your hospital. This is done by conducting one-on-one interviews, using department-specific question sets to identify items to be tagged. We’ll then calculate your savings and present the identified hard cost reduction associated with TRUST using your hospital’s specific data. Contact us for your unique RTLS Impact Analysis and discover The Awarepoint Difference. Tell me more 
