8:15 AM

Opening Remarks

Speaker:

Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal

8:30 AM

RFID Basics for Health-Care Professionals

This session, designed for all seminar attendees looking to understand the various types of RFID technologies—as well as applications for each—will cover active, battery-assisted and passive technologies (high-frequency and ultrahigh-frequency), and explain how each can be deployed to track various assets. The session will also offer a brief overview of EPCglobal's standards, including their relevance in health care.

Speaker:

Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal

9:15 AM

Optimizing Critical Medical Supplies in an Acute Care Setting

UMass Memorial Medical Center is employing radio frequency identification to control the costs of high-value implantable medical supplies, improve patient safety and adhere to regulatory compliance.
Located in Worcester, Mass., UMass Memorial is one of the largest acute-care hospitals in the U.S. Northeast. Its renowned Cardiac Cath Lab has an inventory valuation of more than $2 million to support the more than 7,000 procedures its doctors perform annually. Prior to the RFID deployment, it was a monumental task for the facility to control costs, ensure the proper products were available and manage expiration dates. Learn how UMass has put RFID to work to reduce inventory costs by $300,000, manage bulk-buy opportunities, reduce expiring products and optimize product mix to support physician preferences, while also improving clinical staff workflow.

Speaker:

Kim Carter, Director, Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Interventional Services , UMASS Memorial Medical Center

10:00 AM

Lahey Clinic Expands Use of RFID Across Its Entire Facility

On any given day, the ambulatory care center at the Lahey Clinic Medical Center, in Burlington, Mass., treats approximately 3,000 patients, while hundreds more receive top-quality care in the 295-bed hospital, 24-hour emergency department and trauma center. The center, one of the top medical facilities in the Boston area, has more than 1,500 pieces of moveable medical equipment. In this session, hear how Lahey pioneered the use of RFID for asset tracking in a hospital, and how it has since moved on to additional applications of the technology.

Speaker:

Ed Bortone, CHPA, Director of Materials Services and Security, Lahey Clinic Medical Center

Takeaway:

• Learn how the Lahey Clinic uses RFID for employee parking, external and internal doorway access control, payroll deduction for its cafeteria and scrub-suit acquisition
• How one employee RFID badge is being used for all RFID applications

10:45 AM

Networking Break

11:15 AM

Evaluating Real-Time Location Systems and Creating Success Criteria From a Technical Standpoint

Much has been said regarding the effectiveness of real-time location systems (RTLS) in meeting resource visibility challenges in health care and other fields. But RTLS technology presents specific challenges related to potential interference disruption and ongoing maintenance concerns. In this session, learn how to invest in RFID, as well as how to create success criteria for an RFID hospital implementation and evaluate such a system from a technical standpoint.

Speaker:

Ray Lowe, Senior Director of Enterprise Clinical Implementation (EHR) and Acute Care Strategy, Dignity Health

Takeaway:

• Technical evaluation criteria for RTLS in a health-care setting, including applications, installation, interference and a business model
• An understanding of critical implementation factors, such as patient-care disruption during installation, scalability, infrastructure costs, system reliability, ease of use, maintenance and initial operating costs

12:00 PM

Lunch Break

1:30 PM

RFID in Health Care Panel

Health-care facilities are faced with many choices when it comes to implementing an RFID asset-tracking system, including passive high-frequency (HF) and ultrahigh-frequency (UHF), active 455 MHz, Wi-Fi, Zigbee and ultra-wideband (UWB) systems, as well as ultrasound technology. In this session, leading experts will discuss key issues that health-care providers need to understand when making technology choices.

Moderator:

Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal

Panelists:

Ray Lowe, Senior Director of Enterprise Clinical Implementation (EHR) and Acute Care Strategy, Dignity Health
Pankaj Sood, Founder, McMaster RFID Applications Lab

2:15 PM

The Effects of RFID on Medical Devices

Commonly encountered electromagnetic (EM) environments have been found to affect the performance of some implantable medical devices. Such devices include cardiac pulse generators, neurostimulators, drug infusion pumps, and glucose and cardiac monitors. Adverse EM environmental effects (E3) include the undesired responses of these devices to the environments in which they must function. The growing use of RFID in public areas requires the same attention be given to E3 testing. In this session, hear a brief history of E3 testing for implantable medical devices, as well as a discussion of recent publications indicating the need for establishing RFID testing protocols for medical devices, and an update on a health-care initiative (HCI) to develop testing protocols—a collaboration between AIM Global, Met Labs and the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

Speaker:

Ralph Herkert, PE, Senior Research Engineer, Georgia Tech

3:00 PM

Networking Break

3:30 PM

Beyond Asset Tracking: How UCSD Medical Center Achieved an ROI With an Active RFID Real-Time Location System

The University of California's San Diego Medical Center initially lowered its rental costs for mobile medical equipment and improved its overall equipment and maintenance processes by implementing a real-time locating system (RTLS). However, UCSD has gone beyond asset tracking to develop departmental applications, such as enterprise workflow with medical instrumentation tray tracking across multiple campuses. Learn about the center's original asset-management goals, and how it solved a broad range of process and workflow issues with RFID, including how it managed the equipment used at its Incident Command Center during a recent San Diego fire. In addition, learn how the center reduced inventory requirements and enhanced revenue impact by managing millions of dollars' worth of instrumentation using a sterilizable RTLS tag.

Speakers:

Tom Hamelin, Director of Perioperative Services, University of California, San Diego Medical Center
Scott Sullivan, Business Manager, University of California, San Diego Medical Center

Takeaway:

• The various ways in which RTLS generated a strong return on investment
• How to use RFID to lower inventory requirements, thereby minimizing equipment theft and loss
• Benefits impacting larger clinical-care workflows and improving patient satisfaction and revenue cycle management

4:15 PM

Managing High-Value Medical Products With RFID

The Spinal and Biologics division of Medtronic, Inc., a medical technology firm, offers products that treat a variety of disorders of the spine. The company's biologic portfolio contains products that aid fusion surgeries and distribute human tissue, which are heavily regulated by the FDA, the Joint Commission and the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB). Medtronic is required to know the location of its entire field inventory, including items consigned to hospitals. In this session, hear how the firm has streamlined a manually intensive temperature and inventory reconciliation process with an RFID-enabled cabinet in which each product is separately tagged using Gen 2 RFID technology.

Speaker:

Scott Wilson, Director of Sales Operations, Medtronic

Takeaway:

• The savings Medtronic realized with a streamlined field inventory reconciliation, as well as by freeing up the sales force to spend more hours in surgery promoting the company's product portfolio, versus photocopying or scanning product in the field
• How the use of RFID enables the firm to maintain systemic records that can more easily be submitted to the FDA, the Joint Commission or the AATB, to confirm transaction history, location and temperature monitoring

5:00 PM

Successful Deployment of RTLS in Health Care: What to Demand in a Cooperative Vendor Partnership to Assure Success

San Joaquin Community Hospital, part of the Adventist Health System, recently deployed an enterprise-wide real-time location system (RTLS) covering 350,000 square feet and involving more than 1,300 assets. The system included equipment asset tags and temperature-monitoring tags. In this session, learn how the hospital is employing RTLS as a solution to budget pressures, not as an additional cost. Hear how it worked with its vendor during the installation process to make sure the solution provided a financially significant return on its investment.

Speaker:

Sam Itani, Vice President, San Joaquin Community Hospital

Takeaway:

• The importance of a cooperative partnership in which roles, responsibilities and success criteria are clear, resulting in more productivity with less spending
• How to utilize the data to make business decisions that result in an ROI

5:40 PM

Closing Remarks

Speaker:

Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal

5:45 PM

Conference Concludes