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Utilizing a real-time locating system for surgical equipment inventory management

Thesis: M.B.A., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2019, In conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT / Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2019, In conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 73-76). / Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) manages a large inventory of surgical equipment which must be delivered to operating rooms on-time, efficiently, and according to a set of quality standards. In recent years, flexible scope management has become a topic of interest for many hospitals, as they face pressure to both reduce costs and prevent infections that can result from mismanagement. This thesis proposes a novel method for surgical equipment management in a hospital. The proposed solution uses a real-time locating system to track flexible scopes, a semantic reasoning engine to determine the state of each scope, and a dashboard to inform staff about necessary interventions to avoid scope expirations while maximizing efficiency. This project aims to accomplish three primary goals. First, the project seeks to improve the hospital's compliance to quality standards in order to reduce risks of infection due to expired scopes. Second, the project aims to improve the cost-efficiency of scope disinfecting processes through more efficient inventory management. Finally, the project serves as an opportunity for the hospital to establish best practices for working with the newly installed real-time locating system. The system proposed in this work is piloted at MGH on a subset of the hospital's flexible scopes. The pilot results demonstrated a quality compliance increase from 88.9% to 94.5%. The implementation also resulted in an estimated $17,350 annual cost savings due to more efficient management of scopes. / by Jason Troutner. / M.B.A. / S.M. / M.B.A. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:MIT/oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122567
Date January 2019
CreatorsTroutner, Jason.
ContributorsRetsef Levi and Kamal Youcef-Toumi., Sloan School of Management., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering., Leaders for Global Operations Program., Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Leaders for Global Operations Program
PublisherMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Source SetsM.I.T. Theses and Dissertation
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Format76 pages, application/pdf
RightsMIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission., http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

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