Utilizing a real-time locating system for surgical equipment inventory management

Abstract

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) manages a large inventory of surgical equipment which must be delivered to operating rooms on-time, efficiently, and according to a set of quality standards. In recent years, flexible scope management has become a topic of interest for many hospitals, as they face pressure to both reduce costs and prevent infections that can result from mismanagement. This thesis proposes a novel method for surgical equipment management in a hospital. The proposed solution uses a real-time locating system to track flexible scopes, a semantic reasoning engine to determine the state of each scope, and a dashboard to inform staff about necessary interventions to avoid scope expirations while maximizing efficiency. This project aims to accomplish three primary goals. First, the project seeks to improve the hospital's compliance to quality standards in order to reduce risks of infection due to expired scopes. Second, the project aims to improve the cost-efficiency of scope disinfecting processes through more efficient inventory management. Finally, the project serves as an opportunity for the hospital to establish best practices for working with the newly installed real-time locating system. The system proposed in this work is piloted at MGH on a subset of the hospital's flexible scopes. The pilot results demonstrated a quality compliance increase from 88.9% to 94.5%. The implementation also resulted in an estimated $17,350 annual cost savings due to more efficient management of scopes.