The 2006 Supplier Directory - Orthoworld

LOGISTICS
RFID Technology, continued from page 21
individual patients and surgical case numbers. Thus, instead of
recalling 500 patients to the hospital for testing, it is necessary to
only inform the two or three who were exposed to the same
instruments. How does this work? Each instrument within a sterilization
tray or kit is equipped with an RFID chip, mounted on
the instrument or embedded during manufacture and fully
encapsulated in metal so that it can withstand stringent sterilization
and autoclaving. This chip records data at each step the
instrument takes from the manufacturer all the way through to
the operating room and back again. (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2 – Tracing the steps that the instrument takes.
This is just one example of why a hospital would want to use the
RFID technology. The benefits—for hospital and patient—are
obvious.
The OEM benefits, as well. Asset tracking and inventory management
are significant logistic challenges for many manufacturers.
Instrument kits are often sent to hospitals as part of a loaner
system. Volumes of paper often accompany those instruments in
order to track their usage and validate that they are suitable for
use. RFID chips embedded directly in the instruments virtually
eliminate the need for extensive paperwork. Data can be stored,
recalled and written directly on the instrument itself. The name
22 BONEZone • Winter 2005
of the hospital, the date it was sent, and what the kit contained
can be identified within seconds using a chip reader that projects
the data onto a computer screen. That computer screen can be a
CPU or a handheld PDA, offering considerable convenience
when picking up a kit from one hospital to transport it to the
next. When the kits are returned from the hospital, a bill of
materials, read directly from the tray, can quickly determine if all
of the instruments sent to the hospital were returned. The savings
in lost instruments alone can be dramatic. Even if the hospital
does not want to participate in the program, OEMs can still benefit
from the RFID technology by keeping track of instruments
through their own database.
What if you don’t have a loaner system? Can RFID still be a benefit?
In essence, with an RFID tag as part of the instrument, the
instrument keeps a detailed record of its own history. Traceability
data from raw material to patient can be stored directly on the
instrument, allowing it to carry and maintain its own record
throughout its life cycle. As revealed in Figure 3, an acetabular
reamer can tell you:
Raw material manufacturer
Date of manufacture
Part number
Order number
Shipping and receiving dates
Name of hospital
Number of times used
Each surgical case number
Sterilization record
When to replace
Etc.
RFID Chip
Figure 3 – The “talking” reamer
Two concurrent studies on inventory management control are
being conducted in France and Switzerland at the time of this
writing. Early results from both reveal a 50% improvement in
through-put and productivity, just by storing all identification
information directly on the instrument (Source: MBBS SA), in
effect making RFID built-in, intelligent design.
Uses in Product Identification
With the rise in minimally invasive surgical techniques and the
use of computers in surgery, the need for the ease of product
identification becomes more critical. In computer aided surgery,
key elements of the process require manual input of data to generate
the proper surgical protocol. RFID eliminates the need for
the manual input, thus reducing the risk of error.
For instance, an RFID reader embedded in an acetabular reamer
driver reads the tag embedded in an acetabular reamer and