Canadian Healthcare Technology reported on Oct. 30, 2026 that Mackenzie Health in Richmond Hill is using Intelliguard Mira Care RFID workstations across all 18 of its operating rooms and procedural areas. The workstations automatically document medication taken, replacing manual documentation, and give pharmacy real-time visibility into inventory and expiry dates. The hospital has used RFID in pharmacy since 2014, including across 40 crash carts.
Manual counts are slow, interruptible and easy to get wrong at the end of a long case list. Each one also produces a record written after the fact, from memory, which is exactly the kind of record that drifts from what actually sits on the shelf.
Every count done by hand is time taken from care, and a record that can drift.
Item-level visibility changes the work itself. When the system knows what was taken, what remains and what is about to expire, pharmacy stops chasing counts and starts managing stock. Deploying and supporting that kind of tracked equipment on live clinical floors is the pattern behind KSPACE TECHNOLOGIES' field deployment services for operational technology.
The 2014 starting point matters. Mackenzie Health did not begin in the operating room; it built a decade of RFID practice in pharmacy and crash carts first, then extended a proven pattern into its highest-volume setting.
Departments still hand-counting high-use items should start where Mackenzie Health started: one contained area, one proven workflow, then scale the pattern once the counts prove themselves.