On today's episode of the Healthcare Podcast, host Sean Heath got a crash course on medical crash carts from HealthFirst's marketing and product manager Lynda Goodrich.

Since 1971, Washington-based HealthFirst has been providing dental and medical offices cost-effective solutions for medical emergency preparedness, infection control, medical waste, and regulatory compliance. HealthFirst offers an automated medication replenishment system for crash carts, a wheeled set of drawers or trays that contain emergency medication and equipment for life support protocols in a patient medical emergency.

While crash carts are always found in hospitals and acute care facilities, Goodrich pointed out that medical emergencies happen everywhere.

"Crashes don't only happen to patients in hospitals," Goodrich said. "They can happen anywhere at any time. Parking lot, shopping mall, aircraft ... crash carts are a necessity in hospitals but I would argue they're a necessity everywhere."

While a hospital may have a full crash cart routinely restocked and checked by an on-site pharmacist, a smaller acute care facility may have a smaller, less-used crash kit containing medications prone to expiration or recalls. Manually checking those crash kits takes a lot of manual time and labor, something that can be solved with technology.

"You can log onto OnTraq, for example, and see all of your expiration dates and your lot numbers in case of a national recall, but it also helps eliminate human error," Goodrich said. "Plus, OnTraq's proprietary automatic replenishment system will monitor those expiration dates and prompt a replacement shipment."