Defibrillators

When supplies arrive at the hospital, workers program the tags with the information about the product and attach the tag to the item's packaging.

Not Quite the Fridge In many ways, the cabinets are the real-world implementation of the RFID-enabled refrigerators that have been talked about for years by "smart home" enthusiasts.

Instead of tracking your milk, eggs and chocolate pudding, these cabinets are being used to alert hospital workers when it's time to buy more US$5,000 stents and other lifesaving supplies.

The system also makes it quick and easy to match a device with a patient.

"There are tremendous benefits from the physician's standpoint and the patient safety standpoint because there is a true tracking process for devices that may be potentially recalled," Valentine said.

"Prior to that, we had kind of a manual process that was done, and we had a lot of man-hours being utilized in the tracking process." For example, when a manufacturer alerts the hospital that there's been a recall on a certain type of defibrillator, a hospital worker can type in the model number of the device, and the data from the cabinets will show how many of those The system isn't cheap...

Read more...