Technology Making Big Impact in the Hospital Laundry Sector

Managing patients’ garments and institutional linens has become a real issue for laundries and nursing homes. From soil collection to the restitution of clean items to the appropriate patient, service or department, manual handling of textile products and the lack of reliable identifiers often leads to errors in the distribution process and productivity losses for employees having to spend more time sorting and searching for items rather than caring for patients’ needs.

In response, Dreamydress had designed a powerful infrastructure powered by TAGSYS’ RFID technology to efficiently and precisely track and trace textile products all along their maintenance, management and distribution process cycle and ensure their subsequent return to the rightful owners.

Each piece of garment or linen is identified and linked to the patient lot or establishment using a button-shaped RFID tag from TAGSYS (Ario 370 L-DL) directly sewed onto the item. Laundries collect soiled textiles from the various medical facilities they serve, and launder them together. With Dreamydress’ RFID solution, clean items are automatically sorted by establishment, floor and room and accurately delivered to the right patient or service.

The RFID infrastructure from TAGSYS and Dreamydress includes tunnel readers for rapid soil check-in and clean check-out, a smart shelving system with LEDs to ease the sorting of residents’ garments, and portable RFID readers for rapid controls of cabinet contents to ensure that each patient’s lot is complete and accurate.

“It is fundamental for nursing homes residents to have their own clean garments back as it often permits them to retain as much control over their lives as possible”, comments Antonio Casieri, president of Dreamydress. “Our solutions enable significant productivity gains thanks to the acceleration and reliability of the textile management process. Hospital laundries can now improve the management of thousands of residents’ garments.”

TAGSYS and Dreamydress presented their joint RFID solutions to track and trace nursing home resident’s garments and institutional linens at their booth S03 T10 – Pavilion 4, at the EXPODETERGO show in Milan.