July 19, 2006
Preventing Surgical Boo-Boos With RFID
Twenty-five years ago, when my physician told me that the surgeon who had just operated on my knee had left a loose piece of ligament, I was more than peeved at the problems it might cause me later in life. Technology probably could not have helped that situation, but it could have helped prevent all of the scalpels and sponges the very same surgeon had left in other people's knees, and been sued for. RFID is just such a technology.
A test run at Stanford Medical Center in California has produced 100% read rates on specially-designed RFID tags used on sponges. These tags are designed to withstand the sterilization process that surgery equipment goes through.
The current method of checking that objects have not been left in people's bodies is for O.R. nurses to count all items before and after a surgery. Unfortunately, with the intense pressure in an operating room, stuff like sponges and scalpels do get left behind. According to the Stanford report, about 1500 objects per year are left inside patients after surgery.
That's a small percentage of the total number of surgeries conducted each year, but the mistake can cause health problems. Besides avoiding such problems, using RFID tags can obviously also reduce litigation cases.
But some doctors at other hospitals aren't buying into it, saying that the RFID tag is too costly for the number of sponges used by hospitals daily. However, an older Stanford document shows that the average cost of non-surgical sponges per surgery cost $68.24 compared to $71.06 for the RFID sponges. Their conclusion was that, based on "quality-adjusted-life-years" (QALYs), the RFID sponges were worth the cost. (The CRM/ Newsday article points out that two of the authors of the primary paper are also holders of RFID patents used in the study.)
Given that objects left behind after surgery can cause death in extreme cases and infections or discomfort in lesser cases, not to mention litigation, it seems a few dollars extra would be worth it.
Hospitals have been using RFID for several applications, including monitoring a patient's fall, as well as ensuring that patient data files do not get mixed up in hospital rooms or the O.R., thus resulting in doctors performing the wrong surgery.
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