Case Study

RSS

Mobile medical equipment and carts are moved from patient care areas to central services several times per day. While the care setting changes, the need to efficiently track, clean and replenish medical equipment and medical carts remains constant.

For this reason, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center (WFUBMC), a leading academic medical center serving a 26-county region in North Carolina and Virginia, decided to centralize and automate its equipment and cart services with McKesson's Horizon Equipment Manager™ and Horizon Cart Controller™. As a result, equipment delivery times improved from an estimated 60 minutes to just 30 minutes, and a once time-consuming cart stocking process was shortened from as much as 8 hours to 30 minutes per cart.

Challenges
For years, WFUBMC relied on manual processes to manage medical equipment and carts. This situation led to unreliable asset tracking – erratic equipment delivery, idle or misplaced equipment, improperly maintained or cleaned equipment, medical carts with missing or outdated supplies – and an overburdened nursing staff managing equipment.

Meanwhile, equipment control within central services grew from a single employee providing 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. service weekdays to a staff of 12 providing 24x7 coverage of the 872-bed medical center — including 40 operating rooms, 13 critical-care areas and a separate physician practice building.

"The technicians in my department could perform the same equipment management service as nurses but at a lesser cost," explains Frank Sizemore, central services manager. "With the industry's nursing shortage, the last thing any organization can afford is having nurses manage equipment when they should be delivering patient care."