Students test RFID tracking in ‘hogspital’
Posted on Sunday, August 31, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE — The University of Arkansas owns a virtual island where students such as Keith Perkins have worked for a couple of semesters building parts of a “hogspital.”
Perkins created a medical supply warehouse in a digital realm called Second Life as part of an artificial intelligence class project at the university in Fayetteville.
The project, affiliated with the university’s Center for Innovation in Healthcare Logistics, works toward expanding the use of technology — especially radio-frequency identification technology — to track and order hospital supplies and equipment.
Better tracking results in an improved procurement process, and inventory becomes more “visible.” And hospitals can save money by eliminating order duplications, university officials said when the center opened in March 2007.
Supplies represent about 30 percent of a hospital’s total costs, said Ronald L. Rardin, the John and Mary Lib White Endowed Systems Integration Chair at the university’s department of industrial engineering. VIRTUAL ORDERING, TRACKING
“Second Life is strange in that some things are incredibly easy to do, but impossible in the real world,” said Perkins, a UA senior known in the digital domain as Thinker 51 Brandenburg.
A three-dimensional representation of a person in the virtual world can fly, for example, whereas using a cell phone is difficult to simulate, he said.
University and high school students are helping re-create specific real-world functions on the Web site, run by Linden Lab of San Francisco.
Perkins, 51, said creating the medical warehouse took him about six hours over four weeks. One of his tasks was to program boxes and pallets to move around.
Warehouse items are virtually tracked through RFID tags, which can be the size of a grain of rice or larger. The tags can be attached to pallets, boxes and items in each box. They emit signals that are received by stationary or hand-held scanners.
With a virtual medical supply warehouse, the university can study the most effective ways to order goods, equipment and supplies, Perkins said.
The real-world inventory management system called “just-intime,” in which the least amount of inventory is warehoused, can be simulated, he said. As a result, the administrators of a virtual hospital will know “when it’s the right time to order something and have a way to know what’s in the hospital,” he said.
“There are a lot of real-world problems that we’re getting close to studying and simulating,” Perkins said.
The project uses the virtual world to demonstrate real-world scenarios and experiences to potential customers.
Casey Bailey, a computer science and computer engineering graduate student at the Fayetteville campus, said the most common uses of RFID technology in a healthcare environment are tracking and ordering supplies. In the virtual world, the hospital will be configured so that lost supplies are not a potential danger to patients. In the real world, patient care can be delayed because of misplaced or lost supplies, he said. “It’s hard to keep track of supplies” in the real world, Bailey, 23, said. But in the virtual hospital, if somebody needs to know where “crash cart 31” is, they’ll be able to find it at any time. Hospitals in Norway and Massachusetts already use the technology to track hospital garments and pediatric surgical supplies.
COMMERCIAL REALITY Ordering also becomes more efficient at the university’s virtual hospital.
Instead of having 15 or 20 people managing inventory, if every item is tagged with an RFID chip, the reordering can be done through a database, Bailey said.
“It automates the entire process,” he said.
David Dohr, chief supply chain officer and assistant vice chancellor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, said many hospitals could benefit from improvements made to ordering supplies and equipment.
Orders to multiple vendors are made by fax and online.
But making technological improvements to a hospital supply chain are expensive, an estimated $ 3 million to $ 5 million investment depending on the size of a hospital’s operations, Dohr said.
He said he hoped any virtual project will do a better job at forecasting supply needs with accuracy, since that holds the biggest potential benefit for real-world application.
Second Life can help get the kinks out of the design of a tracking system, said industrial engineering professor Rardin, who’s also the director of the Center for Innovation in Healthcare Logistics.
The virtual hospital is helping to find a “solution before you put it [an RFID system ] in and don’t have to deal with problems after it’s implemented,” he said.
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