From emergency vehicles to hospital supply chains. Trusted across the UK healthcare sector.
Healthcare environments place unique demands on asset tracking technology. Equipment moves constantly between vehicles, sites and clinical settings. Compliance records need to be accurate and immediately accessible. And the hardware itself has to survive conditions that rule out solutions designed for standard commercial environments; industrial washing cycles, thick-walled hospital buildings and the need to avoid interference with sensitive medical equipment nearby.
CoreRFID has been delivering RFID for healthcare for nearly two decades, working with emergency services, medical equipment suppliers and NHS trusts.
A 999 call comes in to East Midlands Ambulance Service every 40 seconds. Across 650 vehicles and six counties, every piece of life-saving equipment needs to be accounted for, compliant and ready to use.
Originally implemented in 2015, the EMAS RFID system has since been upgraded to run on an Android-based platform, replacing what began as a manual tracking process. RFID tags on each piece of equipment are read automatically by handheld devices at up to 2 metres, without line of sight. Location, condition and compliance status update instantly.
“My team needs to be able to find kit and know it’s safe for patient use, having passed all compliance tests. We manage 650 vehicles across six counties, each carrying several pieces of vital life-saving equipment. The RFID system assists us in monitoring this equipment efficiently and effectively.” Steve Farnworth, General Manager, East Midlands Ambulance Service
Tracking medical equipment through a hire cycle is challenging enough. Add industrial decontamination washing cycles to the process and the hardware demands become significantly more specific.
Essential Healthcare processes over 12,000 rental systems annually, each comprising multiple assets that pass through washing cycles, clinical checks and reassembly before rehire. Standard RFID tags won’t survive that process. Active tags were ruled out early; the thick stone walls of older hospital buildings prevent reliable reads. Passive UHF tags, rated for industrial washing and selected specifically for this environment, were the solution.
CoreRFID supplied the tags to be integrate with Essential Healthcare’s existing software. Asset identification time dropped by 50%.
Across the full fleet, that’s 3,418 hours saved every year.
Lucy Mathie, IT & Business Systems Support | Essential Healthcare
Medical Gas Solutions (MGS), part of the Flogas Group, supplies oxygen and nitronox gas cylinders to NHS trusts, ambulance services and emergency response teams across the UK. Managing the full cylinder lifecycle – filling, distribution, inspection and return – across a wide customer base meant cylinder losses, duplicate data and unreliable location records were a persistent problem.
CoreRFID designed and implemented an RFID tracking system that follows each cylinder through every stage of its lifecycle. Cylinders are scanned on filling, tracked through distribution and audited on return. Any cylinder failing inspection is automatically flagged as out of service until cleared by staff. Customers can see cylinder location and usage data in real time.
Dave Donlan, Operations Manager | Medical Gas solutions
