The health care sector can now keep track of babies, medication, and hospital equipment in real time, by tagging equipment or people with small devices that use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
This means a hospital can always have the right medication in storage, in the right quantities, all the time, according to Susmit Pal, Healthcare Strategist, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Dell EMC. He says medical equipment getting lost or stolen can largely be a thing of the past - as can baby snatching or switching.
Devices, medication and patients can be fitted with an unobtrusive transmitter, assigned to a particular area in the facility. If the device moves beyond its designated area, an alarm is triggered.
Medical personnel can then easily track down the device in question and determine whether it is a patient wandering where they are not supposed to, a wearable device accidentally taken, or an actual robbery.
Solving a real challenge
South Africa's public hospitals regularly hit the headlines with a range of issues.
In 2016, government acknowledged that ARVs are stolen from government medicine depots by gangs who manufacture the drug Nyaope. Shortages were therefore not due to a lack of money, but because of theft and poor management systems.
In 2013, a threesome of NGOs investigated claims of corruption and mismanagement in the Eastern Cape - a study that was published in the South African Medical Journal. They found extensive theft of medication from clinics and hospitals, the non-delivery of essential medication and general corruption, the cost of which was already as high as R250 million per year in 2013.
Patients were turned away as clinics ran out of life-saving medication; stock-outages lasted on average 45 days at a time and remained common.
"Medjacking"
Pal says the latest trend in the States is the theft of medical identities, known as 'medjacking'.
Last year South African state attorney Kgosi Lekabe claimed that medical records are being stolen from public hospitals by syndicates and sold to private lawyers for civil cases brought against the government for medical malpractice, or to institute claims against the Road Accident Fund. State lawyers end up appearing in court with no paperwork to contest the case with.
A tech response
Thankfully, an ecosystem of connected hospital assets from medical devices and equipment to tagged disposables, all connected wirelessly to a secure network is now possible. Real-Time Locator Systems (RTLS) track equipment using an integrated platform combining RFID digital sensors, software, analytics and system-wide wireless networking, helping address costs and risks.
While the obvious benefit is improved patient safety and efficient, streamlined care, another benefit is in the ability to reduce the rate of theft and misuse through better asset management.
"Most hospitals we have engaged with see a return on investment (ROI) in less than a year, some saving a million rand in the first week."
Pilot programmes to tag new-born babies with RFID tech to limit snatching are already under way at a South African private hospital.
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