St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton is working with a startup to track in-demand equipment, beginning with beds. Clinical manager Chelsey Sheldrick said some days she would spend hours going from room to room looking for specific mattresses.EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail
Evan Brown says his team of porters at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton want to spend their shifts helping patients as they go to and from appointments. Instead, the hospital’s porters have to waste time each day hunting for misplaced equipment.
“We’re walking to, like, the fifth floor of a parking garage across the street looking for wheelchairs that have been left outside cars,” Mr. Brown said.
“You’re going into the most random places,” said Andrea Urquhart, a member of the team.
But a new innovation at the hospital has them dreaming that those lost hours could soon be behind them.
St. Joseph’s is working with a Waterloo-based startup called Technology Trace to put special low-cost trackers called Trevii on some of their most in-demand equipment to both boost the effectiveness of their care staff’s time and get the most out of the busy hospital’s inventory.
It’s a small part of a larger efficiency drive that all hospitals are exploring as they try to meet growing demand with limited resources.
Evan Brown and Andrea Urquhart demonstrate the hospital's new GPS tracking system, on Dec. 15.EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail
In a small office tucked in a corner of St. Joseph’s floor zero of the Bishop Dowling Wing, Mr. Brown opens the Trevii program on his computer. He selects the kind of equipment he’s looking for – in this case, a gurney with electronic controls and a gel mattress. Dots pop up on a map of the hospital on the screen.
“I’ve got three stretchers on this side of the building, and there’s one over here,” he said.
“I know diagnostic imaging is over there on the left. Chances are those three patients are there because they’re having tests. And then I’ve got this one that’s in a really weird spot, so this is probably the one I’m looking for, right?”
He dispatches Ms. Urquhart with a phone that has a mobile version of the app. She goes down the hallway, turns left and finds the errant stretcher.
Secured to the bottom of the stretcher is a small white box with a few blue lines of words. This is the Trevii device. Inside the box are sensors that can calculate their position in the building based on the location of the hospital’s WiFi transmitters. Trevii is also equipped with other sensors that can detect kinds of motion or use on the equipment they are attached to – for example, timing the beginning of a dialysis treatment.
The small tracking devices use sensors to calculate their position in the building.EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail
Michael Becker, co-founder and chief executive officer of Trace Technology, said one of the goals of the device’s design was to integrate with the hospital’s existing information-technology setup. That keeps costs down by not needing to install new hardware throughout the building.
He said each Trevii sensor is built in Waterloo and costs about as much as a cellphone.
Staff can use a mobile app to track down the equipment they are looking for.EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail
The company is beginning to work with Mohawk Medbuy, one of the largest group purchasing organizations, to sell the devices to more hospitals.
Up on the fifth floor of the Sister Mary Grace wing, clinical manager and nurse Chelsey Sheldrick watches over patients who may be transferred to and from other parts of the hospital, such as the intensive care unit.
Until recently, the only way to keep track of what types of beds were on her floor was to manually count them. If she was trying to find the more supportive gel mattresses, she’d even have to go to each bed and pull up the sheets to look.
“Some days I would spend a couple of hours going around and walking up and down the units, which sounds crazy,” she said – but something she doesn’t have to do as often any more.
So far St. Joseph’s has just installed the Trevii devices on some of its beds, of which it has 600 in all. The hospital and Technology Trace just completed a one-year pilot program in which, they say, there was a 100-per-cent reconciliation rate for tracking assets.
Donna Johnson, St. Joseph’s director of clinical programs, said the hospital is currently deciding which equipment to put the trackers on next, such as intravenous pumps. “We just wish we could have it on everything.”