Introduction
Health Care Logistics® (HCL®) is one of the leading providers of supplies to the healthcare industry, specializing in manufacturing, packaging, and distributing unique and hard-to-find products. HCL supplies hospitals, pharmacies, doctors’ offices, and healthcare professionals with everything from electronics to consumables.
“We worked with SensThys to create a second generation, on-prem automated pharmaceutical inventory system focused on drug kits and trays. SensArray readers allowed us to cost effectively implement Stat Stock® cabinet system (Stat Box) achieving all performance and formfactor goals. We then layered EPIC on this, which eliminated the few errors still creeping in from the RFID-based solution.”
– Kurt Wolf, Vice President Technology
Customer: Health Care Logistics®
Industry: Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Supplies
Challenges: Inaccurate pharmaceutical inventory management at customer sites.
SensThys Solution: Stat Stock® is an automated onsite drug management system using SensArray readers and EPIC tag data correction technology.
Results: The solution automates item counting, expiry date validation and even pulls recalled items while reducing the inventory process from 20 minutes to just 3…
Solution Description
The Stat Stock® system is comprised of metal cabinet (available in various sizes) that incorporates a SensThys SensArray reader/antenna unit (a single 10”x10”x0.8” tile-like device). The reader is PoE powered and in essence invisible to the user. The thin formfactor allows the cabinet height to be absolutely minimized. A number of these cabinets can be installed into pharmacy or hospital and shared on a single network. Drugs, vials, and other consumables are assigned to a tray and each tray has its individual constituents registered, logged, and checked. Each time the tray enters the Stat Stock cabinet, both the tray and its contents are read and compared to the prior log. EPIC autocorrects any bad tag data to ensure only good tag data enters, removing any errors at the edge of the system. This guarantees the delta between the last log and the latest tag data is truly representative of the consumed items. This is fed into the Stat Stock software, which confirms the correctly read data. Stat Stock automatically logs these differences into the inventory and allows the automation of replenishment to the tray at the facility level. In addition to item counts, Stat Stock validates expiry dates and checks for item recalls giving users the utmost confidence in their stock.
Benefits
Stat Stock is enabled by the formfactor and performance of the SensArray reader and EPIC data correction. The solution automates item counting, expiry date validation and even pulls recalled items while reducing the inventory process from 20 minutes to just 3. The accuracy of the tracking is increased to essentially 100% with the use of EPIC and allows HCL to provide a truly differentiated product to the marketplace.
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