Greenville Hospital Deploys Integrated RFID Solution For Operating Room Asset Tracking

By Thing Magic, Inc. and Industrial Portals, a Division of Jamison Door Company

The Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center spans five hospital facilities, with 1,110 beds and 32 surgical suites across 90,000 square feet of physical facilities, serving the citizens of upstate South Carolina. Of the hospital's 7,500 employees, approximately 1,000 are physicians. Each year, these physicians perform over 33,000 inpatient and outpatient procedures, incurring about $52 million in expenses, or about half the total for the entire system.

At this size, it was not uncommon for expensive surgical instruments (probes) and other equipment to be misplaced or lost, so Greenville Hospital's materials services group sought to minimize asset loss and reduce the time spent locating OR materials. Though a wireless network was in place, John Mateka, executive director, materials services, determined it was insufficient to meet all of the hospital's asset tracking needs, so he and his staff began investigating an integrated Wi-Fi, UHF RFID, bar coding and mobile computing based solution.