Essay Sample on RFID in Operating Rooms

Introduction

A mandatory hospital policy requiring the use of RFID to decrease errors in the operating room is essential. The safety of the patients is very critical, and the issues that concern any operating room should always be uncompromised. Errors that occur in operating rooms have been growing in the healthcare sector especially during surgical practices. The four main issues that are of increasing concern in the operating rooms are having the right patient in the proper operating room, and ensuring that the correct procedure is followed during operations by the right medical staff. Thus in an operating room, the four requirements to ensure that a patient gets the proper treatment are correct patient, correct operating room, correct medical staffs, and the correct operation. If any of these requirements are overlooked, then injury or harm can result to the patient, cause the patient and staffs to have anxiety, disrupt the flow of treatment which in the end my results to medical errors in the operating rooms (Takizawa, 2010). Thus it is essential that an RFID (Radio-frequency identification) system can be used to track patients, doctors, and expensive equipment in hospitals in real time to ensure that the correct patients get identified, their treatment monitored and that they get the treatment at the right time.

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In healthcare, the operating room is the most complex environment and errors that occur there can be very catastrophic and may even result in death and consequences to the surgeon and the institution. A research conducted by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) showed that about 76% of deaths and injuries in the operating rooms involved surgery that was done on the wrong body parts while 11% of the deaths and injuries showed that that the surgical procedure was wrong (Lighter, n.d.). When an institution is experiencing these adverse surgical events, i.e., wrong side, wrong site, the incorrect procedure and even the wrong patient which is the most devastating and unacceptable adverse effect, they may face litigation. Most of these adverse effects that happen during surgery are substantial, and most are preventable. When RFID get used during the operations, it makes it almost impossible or extremely difficult for human errors to occur which would harm the patients. The RFID technology has been applied in so many fields, but only a few sessions have been tried in the operating rooms. The RFID can be used to detect errors that may lead to surgery to the wrong site or the wrong patient.

When the manual process of patient identification happens, the nurse verifies the identity of a patient by asking the name of the patient against the medical record. In the occurrence that the nurse did not identify the patient correctly either due to illegal entry of patient data in the medical file, then the wrong patient may be taken to the wrong operating room. The failure by a nurse to correctly identify patients is hazardous when it comes to the safety of the patient, and it can even lead to loss of life. Thus it is very critical that active communication techniques are used to identify patients, and it would be even better if two identifiers where used in the process. When RFID is in place, then it mitigates errors that may arise during identification, and thus it is an excellent means of complementing the human-based verification that is prone to so many mistakes that may be lethal ("RFID in Hospitals, track patient, doctors, costly instruments, hospital asset management," n.d.).

The RFID can be integrated with other hospital information systems to help in surgical site verification. This would be very important in decreasing the incidence of wrong side or site surgery whereby a patient's critical information is displayed on a monitor once they enter the operating room. Due to the use of RFID, the adverse effects that can arise due to surgery on the patient can be significantly reduced. A health care facility may have more than one operating room each operating room performing more than one surgery case daily. In such cases, then many opportunities arise where surgeons and even patients enter the wrong operating rooms without reconfirming. When such a situation arises, a wrong surgery may take place. However, when using the RFID system and a patient or surgeon enters the wrong operating room, the system will create warming on the monitor alerting on the said error. Thus, the RFID system is used to show when incorrect location event happens and as a result preventing a wrong surgery ("Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and patient safety," n.d.).

When an anesthetist is about to administer drugs, a decision on the medicine to give and the method to use when giving it is imperative. Surgery cannot take place before the drugs are administered, and therefore an anesthetist must have sufficient information regarding the patient. This information is obtained in two ways, verbally whereby the anesthetist asks the patient and reviewing the patient's medical records. There is a high likelihood that some crucial information does not appear on the patient's medical records or the patient may be unconscious or too elderly to answer the questions asked. As a result, this may expose the patient to danger, and the aspect of fishing for information from the unfiltered data by the anesthesia staff is inefficient. RFID system ensures that the anesthetist enters the right operating room and administers the correct medical treatment. The information that may aid anesthetic team to provide proper aesthetics appears on the monitor when the team gets into the operating room. The anesthetic can refer to the information on the monitor without asking the patient questions or checking medical reports. In case of an abnormal value, then it is marked in red, and the medical staff can pick on it quickly.

Wrong operations can happen when in the operating room. The incorrect operation will include an inappropriate procedure or a surgery on the wrong site. This may occur because a surgeon may have to check a patient's medical record and charts that show the surgery site. Sometimes the doctors depend on their memory on what they know on the patient without double-checking condition since looking at the papers may not be convenient. Also, a wrong operation may occur when a surgeon is operating on more than one patient at the same time or when one surgeon substitute for the other. When using RFID, the system will check whether the surgeon has entered the right operating room which helps prevent doctors going into the wrong operating rooms and performing wrong surgeries. The monitor also provides the surgeon with critical information about a patient. The information is thus centralized which saves time and increase the safety of the patient.

Even after surgery, nurses have to keep updating the patient's status when they change. The operating room nurses are required to provide care and support before surgery, during surgery, and after surgery, and this may be distracting to the medical staff and hinder professionalism when providing care to the patients. The medical staff need not be distracted from their surgery related tasks. This can only happen by using an RFID-based system whereby the patient's updates happen automatically due to the integration of the RFID with the hospital information system back-end.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this mandatory policy of using RFID in operating rooms would help save a lot of lives, eliminate mistakes, reduce costs due to litigations and save on time. By mitigating surgical errors, lives are preserved. RFID is thus critical before, during and after surgery in the operating rooms.

References

Lighter, D. E. (n.d.). Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). Encyclopedia of Health Care Management. doi:10.4135/9781412950602.n433

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and patient safety. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3872592/

RFID in Hospitals, track patient, doctors, costly instruments, hospital asset management. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.dassnagar.com/Software/AMgm/RF_products/it_RF_hospitals.htm

Takizawa, O. (2010). RFID-based Disaster-Relief System. Sustainable Radio Frequency Identification Solutions. doi:10.5772/8018