Catheterization Laboratory, commonly known as Cath lab, is a specialized room of a hospital equipped with special machinery and equipment to enable doctors to diagnose or treat heart-related diseases. A catheter, amongst others, is one of the major tools used to perform the procedure of diagnosis or treatment in the Cath lab. It is a slender-shaped flexible plastic tube that can be inserted into the blood vessel to access the heart and deliver treatments instead of performing surgery. Among other equipment, the Cath lab includes specialized diagnostic imaging equipment, which helps the doctors examine arteries and chambers of the heart by visualizing them. It also helps them evaluate and assess the flow of blood moving from and to the heart. To get visuals of the diagnostic imaging equipment, an x-ray dye is passed through the catheter into the arteries.
Cath labs, therefore, require advanced technology, such as RFID systems and labels to perform such medical activities. RFID keeps hospitals ultra-modern and up-to-date about the volume of stock and its expiry date and helps maintain a record of items used on a patient so that patients can be accurately billed.
Why Cath Labs Deployed RFID?
Like others, the medical field has also received great benefits by bringing technology into its use. To ensure patient safety, provide cheap and effective services to humanity for the alleviation of their miseries, hospitals do research and try to bring information technology into use. Catheterization laboratories brought RFID to bring optimization to the inventory. Previously, due to a lack of optimization, Cath labs had to face multiple problems and go through lengthy and time taking processes to manually make inventories. Deployment of RFID in hospital facilitate staff to precisely evaluate, keep a check on supplies and help monitor their expiry dates.
Benefits of RFID Application in Cath Lab
RFID has proved to be a boon for Cath labs. Cath labs can now keep a precise track record of stock i.e., catheters and stents and remain informed of their availability or consumption. It saves labs from huge losses that occur due to the disappearance, stealing or expiry by ensuring that they are properly invoiced. It also saves patients from facing any possible danger due to the removal of expired products from the stock. Moreover, it protects them from maintaining too much inventory.
How (Active or Passive) RFID System Works in Cath Lab?
Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, is a technology via which objects can be spotted specifically via a unique identifier. The identifier identifies the object by communicating with the computer chip, which contains information concerning the object. It is an inexpensive chip having the size of a mole, and is held by a tag or label attached or affixed to every object.
Currently, there are two types of tags i.e., active tags and passive tags. Both of these tags are used by Cath labs. Active tags are used to track valuable assets of permanent use (e.g., medical equipment, machinery, and computers). Passive tags, on the other hand, are used for consumable products (e.g., catheters, stents, balloons etc.).
Outcomes of RFID Implementation in Cath Labs
By using RFID technology, Cath labs have avoided huge losses and raised their profit ratio. By deploying an RFID-based inventory management system, Florida Hospital Cardiovascular Institute in Orlando U.S.A has been saving $1.7 million annually, and saved more than $5 million via RFID integrations. Similarly, the regional director of invasive heart and vascular services at Providence Health System in Portland, namely Dan Scharbach, stated that by using RFID technology in their Cath lab, they witnessed two-fold savings in inventory purchases.
