In today’s fast-paced healthcare environments, hospitals are constantly seeking new ways to improve efficiency, enhance patient care, and reduce operational costs.
One area where inefficiency often lurks is the management of available beds which has a direct impact on patient flow, waiting times, and overall care quality.
Updating bed availability following patient discharge can often take minutes or even hours, leading to delays and inefficiencies.
With the NHS facing ongoing pressures and occupancy rates consistently exceeding safe levels[1], improvements in discharge processes could significantly reduce bed shortages.
By introducing a system which combines passive UHF RFID-enabled patient wristbands and RFID-enabled smart containers for wristband disposal during discharge, hospitals can make significant strides in improving their bed management processes as bed statuses can be updated automatically in seconds.
The current situation
In most hospital settings, nursing and other healthcare professionals manually update a bed management system to indicate that a bed is ready for cleaning or directly notify the cleaning team after a patient has been discharged. While this process typically only takes a few minutes, it can extend to several hours during peak periods, which significantly impacts the speed of bed turnaround.
Consequently, with bed availability in acute hospitals often at critically low levels, hundreds if not thousands of staff hours are spent each year on phone calls to wards to establish whether there are any beds available.
The deployment of these valuable staff resources not only impedes the efficiency of hospital operations, but also gives rise to patient dissatisfaction and increased hospital costs. In the 2022/23 financial year, the NHS incurred direct costs amounting to £1.89 billion due to delayed discharges, according to data from the The King’s Fund.[2]
In the context of ongoing challenges with hospital waiting lists, which reached a record high of 7.6 million earlier this year3, delays in turning around free beds for the next patient can create unnecessary bottlenecks. As a result, the lack of available beds can lead to the cancellation of planned surgical procedures, further exacerbating the already considerable backlog.
Transforming the bed management process
By automating the process of updating the bed management system with passive RFID technology, the time to flag up a bed ready for cleaning can be reduced by over 90% from minutes or hours to literally seconds. This ensures vital systems are kept up to date without delay and provides accurate data for analytics and forecasts.
Solutions like this also save staff time by eliminating the need for nurses and other healthcare professionals to manually update a bed management system, allowing them to focus on their primary patient care tasks.
How does it work?
On admission, an RFID wristband printer is used to print the patient wristband, replacing the standard wristband printer. Some advanced systems offer the functionality to automatically associate the patient details with the wristband ID in a database, which means there are no additional steps for staff to follow during the admission process. As with standard wristbands, patient details and a barcode are also added to ensure that any existing processes can remain in place.
The use of UHF passive RFID (also known as RAIN RFID) technology, which does not require batteries, means that wristbands are inexpensive and often only cost marginally more than standard disposable wristbands.
Upon discharge, the patient’s RFID-enabled wristband is simply placed into a specially designed smart container equipped with internal RFID readers. This automatically detects the ID of any new wristband that is added, and via data transfer, updates the bed management system, removing the need for manual data entry.
Typically, RFID discharge management solutions can also be configured to send notifications – for example via SMS or email – to cleaning staff, alerting them that a bed is ready to be processed. Alternatively, a live dashboard on a screen in the cleaning team’s central base can be updated with details of all beds ready to be cleaned.
Saving time while improving patient care
From a broader operational perspective, automating the bed management process also helps to improve communication across departments. Instead of relying on time-consuming phone calls, manual status updates or even visits to other wards to check for free beds, the central bed management system is kept up to date and can provide immediate visibility into real-time bed availability. This is particularly important during peak periods when patient flow is critical to maintaining efficiency.
Automating the process of updating the bed management system following discharge, also means that nurses no longer have to update the system manually, which saves time for patient care and reduces the potential for human error. Instead, they simply place the patient wristband into an RFID-enabled smart container.
Seamless integration with existing systems and other tracking solutions
To maximise these benefits, its advisable to choose a solution that can integrate seamlessly with existing hospital systems and can also be extended to other aspects of operations to provide additional benefits.
Tracking mobile medical devices, monitoring sterilisation processes, automatic temperature monitoring and patient flow solutions are all excellent examples of how RFID and other tracking technologies are used in NHS Trusts and other healthcare settings to improve efficiency and reduce costs while improving patient outcomes.
As healthcare systems continue to face growing demands, the need for innovative solutions becomes ever more pressing. The adoption of the latest identification and location tracking technology in bed management marks a pivotal step forward in addressing long-standing challenges in hospital environments.
By Simon Dawkins, Lead RFID Consultant of Healthcare at RFiD Discovery
Simon Dawkins joined RFiD Discovery, the UK’s leading provider of RFID healthcare tracking solutions and part of Paragon ID, as RFID Product Manager in 2016. Now, as Lead RFID Consultant, he is devoted to promoting the benefits of location tracking technologies to healthcare providers throughout the UK and worldwide.
In his role Simon advises NHS Trusts and other healthcare providers on the use of RFID and other technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for their specific requirements and supports them during implementation to ensure maximum benefit.
Previously Simon was Head of the Medical Equipment Library at Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) where he pioneered the use of active and passive RFID tracking for a total of 37,500 mobile medical devices, included the first roll-out of GS1 compliant asset labelling in an NHS Trust. Using RFID tracking, Simon has improved efficiency, increased patient safety and delivered significant savings to CUH.
[1] https://rcem.ac.uk/nhs-crisis-continues-as-hospital-bed-numbers-near-capacity/
[2] https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/blogs/hidden-problems-delayed-discharges
