Tokyo's St. Luke's International Hospital has completed a pilot of RFID technology to track the movement of equipment, according to an article on the RFID Journal website.
The technology identified stock levels at each of its wards in real time, and reduced the number of staff visits to the central clinical engineering room by approximately 55 percent.
St. Luke's includes 13 floors and a total of 646,000 square feet of facility space in its main building. Recently, it added an annex and a 19-bed birth clinic.
All shelves in the medical engineering center, as well as throughout 22 wards, were retrofitted with RFID-enabled sheets that are laid over each shelf. Tagged items are placed directly onto those sheets.