Tokyo San Luke International Hospital to complete the pilot mobile RFID tracking project pilot. The hospital found that the technology can be real-time to determine the inventory of each ward, and the central clinical engineering room to reduce the number of visits by about 55%. The technology, known as Recopick, is provided by Teijin, a Japanese carbon fiber and plastics technology company.

St. Luke Hospital received 2550 outpatients every day, with a total of 520 beds. Hospital building a total of 13 floor, an area of about 60,000 square meters. At present, the hospital is still expanding to meet the needs of the community. Recently, the hospital added an obstetric clinic with 19 beds.

St. Luke International Hospital

In the hospital, most of the equipment that is no longer used (such as infusion pumps, syringe pumps, low pressure continuous aspiration devices and oxygen flow meters, etc.) are stored in the central clinical engineering room. This means that every day a lot of staff looking for equipment out of the central clinical engineering room. For equipment management, the hospital has used a bar code system, equipment to be returned when the need to scan bar code. But the process is very time-consuming, so nurses will store these devices in their own ward for quick access. For hospitals, this means that items are lost and they need to be replenished often.

Therefore, St. Luke International Hospital since 2016 began to look for a better program, and with the spring began to deploy Recopick. Approximately 1300 pumps and oxygen flow meters attach a passive UHF RFID tag with a waterproof housing.

Natsuki Aramoto, head of the company's intelligence-aware application development team, says all shelves in the medical engineering center and 22 wards are equipped with Recopick RFID-enabled bed sheets. Marked items are placed directly on these sheets. Each shelf unit is equipped with a CSL-supplied CS468 card reader and Teijin's antenna to read the tag ID number.

The reader will forward the collected data to the software, indicating the item storage location. Recopick also provides a processing unit that supports RFID so that users can view discarded items. The project room shelf is divided into two categories: the area to be cleaned or maintained, and the area where the maintenance equipment has been cleaned.

When the hospital marks the device, the software stores the item-related information and binds it to the tag ID. This information will be processed by Recopick software.

When the nurse takes the item from the engineering room, the system can automatically update the state by removing it. If the label is not read for more than 120 minutes, its status is updated to "in use".

After the equipment has been used, the nurse should be returned to the engineering room for cleaning and maintenance. Employees only need to place them on the shelf, the system will automatically update the state. After cleaning and maintenance, the employee will place it in the reserved area for the next use.

When looking for a specific device, employees can search within the software to confirm the real-time location of the item. Aramoto said: "The hospital can analyze these data to confirm the use of equipment." In 2012, Teijin officially launched the Recopick solution. Since then, the company has been improving technology.