The pharmacy store at INOVA Health System is responsible for managing, supervising, controlling and distributing medication kits and trays all over the hospital. The manual distribution of medicines, trays and kits is a time-consuming, unproductive and vulnerable process. INOVA pharmacy team also needs to continuously monitor racks and freezers where these kits or trays are kept stored and required to maintain an adequate amount of stock levels with a cost-effective system. To overcome these hurdles, INOVA teams entail a medication management solution focusing on the following benefits:
- Intelligently and flexibly restocking pharmaceutical kits and trays.
- Enhance identification and immediate removal of recognized medicines.
- Reduce staff efforts on manual working and tasks.
- Automatic monitoring of expiry date of medicines.
- Limitation of staff mistakes while distributing the medicines.
- Gain prominence to actionable details for inventory optimization and cost-effective solution.
Deployment of RFID Technology
INOVA health care system deployed RFID technology to manage the medication and pharmaceutical activities. The implementation of RFID at INOVA health systems brings successful results to reduce human errors, saving precious staff time and providing valid usage analytics, which improves inventory levels and therefore, introduces a cost-effective solution. Besides, the RFID system enables the INOVA health care authorities to gain visible insights into the item-level inventory database to determine expiration dates, refine the identification, and help the staff team to drive the removal of recalled medications.
“The system is super easy to use; so we had buy-in right away and training our technician and pharmacist colleagues was quick and easy! – Arpit Mehta, Pharmacy Operations Manager, INOVA Fairfax Medical
Outcomes of RFID Implementation at INOVA
- Before RFID, INOVA teams were looking for a solution that must save both time and money. RFID technology not only provides cost containment and faculty efficiency but also improves the security of health care systems.
- Due to the automated process, the INOVA health care department became successful in reducing human errors and mistakes. The RFID implementation ensures that all the necessary critical steps are being taken care of, and are not missed during the replenishment process.
- The RFID technology also eases the life of technicians and pharmacists working at the INOVA healthcare facility. The availability of an integrated computing system along with the touch screen helps the medical teams to perform all tasks quickly and easily.
- Compared to manual tasks, the medical staff has also seen promising results from the automated RFID systems. The staff concluded that results were fast and more accurate than manual methods. As per the results, zero errors were achieved through the RFID system and 100% accuracy rate.
- The RFID implementation at INOVA labs saved the tray restocking time and staff effort. The system saved staff time up to 3-5minutes per tray, which helped the team to process an average of 3,696 tray events annually, improving the overall productivity of the system.
If you’ve any questions about RFID in pharma, please leave a comment below or contact us.
RFID LABEL provides a variety of RFID tags/labels to revolutionize the future of the pharma and medical sectors. Improve patient safety, reduce the workload of staff and automate the workflow of collecting and distributing medicines through our valuable RFID labels.
