Purpose: An assessment of anesthesia trays across a large health system found variability in the medications stored in operating rooms at each care site. Differences in anesthesia tray contents have the potential to cause medication errors, charge capture issues and creates variances in drug shortage management across the health system. This case describes how data from RFID tagged medications can be used to assess tray contents and develop standardized tray recommendations.
Methods: All anesthesia trays that utilized RFID tags were identified across the health system. Trays were grouped based on the identified case type and the contents of each tray were compared. Anesthesia trays were grouped into four different case types which included: general anesthesia, endoscopy, obstetrics, and cardiac cases. Trays servicing cardiac procedures were excluded from this work as not all care sites offered cardiac services and significant practice differences were identified. RFID tag generated data was collected over a 90-day period and included overall medication usage, medication pars in each tray as well as the maximum medication use per tray in a single day during the assessment period. The data was reviewed by the primary investigator, an anesthesiologist champion and anesthesia leaders from each care site. Anesthesia provider feedback was used for the final recommendations.
Results: Upon review, 66 different anesthesia tray variations were identified which contained 111 unique medication products across all the trays. A review of the RFID tag data provided numerous insights into how medications were utilized in operating rooms across the care sites. The initial medication tray recommendations were developed based on the most frequently used medications across all the care sites. Additional recommendations focused on standardizing medication concentrations, vial sizes, removing low-use medications and ensuring routine emergency medications remained. Pars were based on routine usage across the sites. The recommendations for the three standardized anesthesia trays were taken to anesthesia leaders from each care site for review. Input from providers was used to create the final list of medication in each standardized tray for general anesthesia, endoscopy, and obstetrics cases.
Conclusion: The use of RFID tagged medications provide robust data to assess medication usage in the operating room. Data from RFID tags can be used to create recommendations for standardized anesthesia trays in a large health system.
Learning Objectives:
List the benefits of standardized anesthesia medication trays.
Identify ways RFID tag technology can be used to provide robust operating room data collection.
Describe the development process for standardized anesthesia trays.