Yet again this week, I have another RFID sales pitch, based on the Time Saved Model forwarded to me for my opinion. Why? My opinion never changes about the companies trying to convince healthcare that saving time, saves money, if they buy their time saving solutions. This model hinges on one critical factor that is often ignored. You can only save time in finding something if you look for it in the first place. And here is where we see the supplier’s ignorance of how healthcare works.
RFID solution providers arrogantly state that you will save for arguments sake 20 minutes per day per nurse. These are huge savings that would easily justify the large capital investment in these solutions. But the KPI being used here is flawed. And seriously flawed enough to waste that investment. All hinging on one factor. An assumption. The nurse will actually use the system to look for the equipment that will then be found with 20 minutes efficiency of time saving. But ask yourself. Has the nurse really got time to find a PC, log on, find your tracking website and search for the equipment they are looking for? The simple answer is no. My studies showed that in a 400 bed hospital actual searches by nurses were approximately 10 times a month. Yes, a search for equipment was only done on average once to twice a week for the entire hospital. I would like throw my own assumption in here, that search was done by a senior member of staff responding to complaints from staff that they can’t find equipment and it was holding up care; then the senior nurse sits down to see if their digital tools can help.
What we have is an assumption that human nature of go look for something, will be instantaneously replaced with an adopt digital tools culture. Furthermore, my studies on RFID movement profiles showed that a piece of equipment moving from an equipment store to the actual bedside rarely took a straight route. What we saw was that the equipment was moving to various other locations, that also held goods, information, consumables that the nurse would need. It was easy to conclude here that nurses were multitasking. And this also showed that tracked equipment was being joined with other tracked equipment during the multi-tasking period from store to bedside. In simple terms, they were found enroute to the patients.
Movement is key to understanding efficiency. Within our studies we noticed that Oxygen cylinders were moving at 6am in the morning. This corresponded with job scheduling for facilities to stock up all the cylinders first thing in the morning. What the data showed was that the number of cylinders varied each day, with a repeating pattern. The closer to cylinder delivery day the less cylinders were moving. With a large restock occurring the day after the delivery lorry arrived at 10am on set days. The principle being used was stock up as many as possible each day and not to analyse the number cylinders returning as use case planning. Simple integration could update the automated job scheduling with the actual number of cylinders needed each day instead just fill the trolley up with as many as you can carry.
So what does this tell us about the metrics we need to properly create a financial ROI model of an RFID system.
- Time saved equations have to use the actual number of times a nurse used the system to find equipment as evidence of time savings. A simple KPI needs to added to solutions so that evidence of the searches can be produced.
- Store to bedside times need to be recorded and again analysed for performance. The quicker nurses can get equipment to the patient can be used as KPI for performance of the solution.
- Real value in RFID for healthcare comes from profile management, understand the movements, automate and integrate with existing systems. Provide real time data to tasks to inform them and remove elements of human nature that might not be the most efficient use of resources.
RFID solutions will provide huge cost savings in efficiency and planning to healthcare but its understanding the value of the data that it brings to the organisation. With tens of thousands of RFID transactions per day in a system it is easy to place a value of fractions of a penny on each transaction, but that information will pay for itself when its shared with systems that can really use it for good use.