Brazilian hospital uses RFID Tags to track 158,000 bed sheets

Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, a nonprofit hospital in Brazil, is using RFID technology to digitally manage thousands of items of bedding — from sheets to towels and patient pillowcases.

The solution enables healthcare providers to track bedding usage, cleaning and return to cabinets to ensure adequate inventory and efficient replenishment. What's more, hospitals use this solution in a fraction of the time it takes to use a manual system, saving approximately $300,000 annually.

With RFID technology, each piece of bedding is uniquely identified and data about its usage is managed by the hospital’s software platform Smartxhub, provided by technology company IDvida IoT.

The Einstein Hospital in São Paulo, Brazil, is an 800-bed medical facility spanning several city blocks and covering an area of 273,000 square meters. In order to provide services to the thousands of patients treated by this hospital, there are 150 bedding cabinets in the hospital, and bed sheets and other items in the cabinets need to be replenished four times a day. Rafael Vitolo, the hospital's RFID project leader, said that among the approximately 158,000 items of bedding, there are approximately 35 categories of sizes and models.

Each storage area or cabinet has a minimum inventory requirement. During the morning shift, the number of sheets and pillowcases is higher, while the evening shift sets another minimum level. Due to the size of the hospital complex and the ever-increasing number of storage areas, hospital staff previously had to travel multiple times between sites to perform tedious manual inventory checks.

In addition, all bedding is washed at an external outsourced laundry facility approximately 50 kilometers away from the hospital, making the entire bedding supply chain even more complex.

The hospital hopes to use RFID technology to improve the logistics process of bedding from patient to cleaning to storage and reuse. They started using the technology in the second half of 2022 and spent about five months analyzing the results to determine the expected return on investment.

Bedding suppliers are tagging shipments to hospitals with passive UHF RFID tags. The tag is encoded into a unique ID that is associated with the item in the SmartxHub software.

"Whenever we purchase new bedding, we provide our RFID tags to the manufacturer, and before they tag and deliver the material to us, we put the tags on it for immediate use," says Hospital Bed Supplies Coordinator Renata Santos explains.

When clean, laundered and ironed bedding is delivered to the hospital from an external laundry facility, they enter through an RFID gate reader that reads all tags. The software provides data on which cabinets need to be replenished and the existing inventory in the receiving "laundry room."

The bedding is then routed to the necessary cabinets based on the supply quantities provided by the software. When the cabinets are replenished, staff use handheld readers to read all tags. The user can view the display of supplementary counting results.

By reducing labor hours by approximately 6,000 hours per year, the hospital expects to realize annual financial benefits of approximately $29,000 in labor cost reductions alone.

“For every new replenishment, we need to scan the location using an RFID reader so that the system generates replenishment requirements based on the minimum inventory information that should be available at that location,” Vitolo said.

Since the system was put into use, the hospital has conducted a full inventory inventory every two months, and the inventory time has been reduced from the previous 72 hours to 10 hours. On average, hospitals were able to reduce each bedding supply worker's work day by 30 minutes. By reducing labor hours by approximately 6,000 hours per year, the hospital expects to realize annual financial benefits of approximately $29,000 in labor cost reductions alone.

The system also enables hospitals to identify instances when items have been damaged, misused or need to be replaced. 

Since the technology went live, Vitolo said bedding loss rates have dropped from 4% of total volume to 0.8%, while inventory accuracy has improved. Another benefit: the external laundry plant uses 12% less water and reduces electricity consumption by 139,000 kWh per year.

Vitolo reports that as a result of all these benefits, the hospital realized approximately $300,000 in financial benefits in 2023.