AP-HM to tag linen with RFID after losing 60,000 sheets a year across its Marseille hospitals

AP-HM, the public hospital group that runs Marseille’s four university hospital sites, is preparing to tag its bed sheets with RFID after internal audits put the cost of missing linen at an estimated 400,000 EUR a year. The group says around 60,000 sheets disappear annually across its estate.

Assistance Publique – Hopitaux de Marseille is the largest health centre in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region, with 3,397 beds and around 2,000 physicians spread across La Timone, Hopital Nord, La Conception and the Hopitaux Sud sites of Sainte-Marguerite and Salvator. Linen for all of them comes out of a single building. The Plateforme Logistique, known internally as the PFL, is a 25,000 square metre facility that opened on 19 April 2013 and houses catering, sterilisation, warehousing and transport alongside the laundry. The laundry alone treats 12 to 14 tonnes of linen a day.

What the audits found

The PFL audited linen handling across the hospital sites and came back with three recurring problems: sorting that was too complex to get right under pressure, bags arriving back at the laundry open rather than sealed, and departments simply running short of bags and sheets. None of those are exotic failures. They are the everyday friction of moving several tonnes of textiles a day between one central plant and dozens of wards.

Three fixes landed before the tracking project. From January 2026 the number of coloured sorting bags was reduced, with the stated aim of limiting sorting errors, securing flows and making the work easier for ward teams and laundry staff alike. The bags themselves moved from snap-button closures to a Fixlock system, intended to stop accidental openings in transit and to improve working conditions for nursing staff handling them. The PFL also bought additional bag stock so departments are less likely to run dry.

Tagging the sheets

The traceability project is the larger piece of work. AP-HM plans to chip its sheets so that each one is read automatically as it arrives at the laundry, then allocated to a site and a department on the way back out. The point is arithmetic rather than policing. Once you know how many sheets a ward actually holds, you can size its allocation properly instead of over-issuing to cover a shrinkage rate nobody has measured.

One caution for anyone reading this as a technical reference. AP-HM has not published a specification. The announcement names no frequency, no tag format, no vendor and no read method, so what follows describes how healthcare laundry RFID is commonly done rather than what Marseille has actually bought.

How linen tagging is usually done

Laundry transponders are built for an environment that destroys ordinary labels. The chip and antenna are encapsulated in materials such as thermoplastic polyurethane or silicone, and the tag is either sewn into a hem or a pouch or heat-sealed onto the fabric. Heat-sealing tends to win when linen already in circulation is being retrofitted, because it is quick and leaves nothing for a patient to feel. Suppliers typically certify laundry tags for 200 or more full industrial cycles covering washing, dewatering, drying, ironing and folding, and healthcare-grade parts are rated to survive sterilising heat and pressure as well. Terms like transponder, encapsulation and read point are explained in the RFID glossary.

The reading side is what makes the economics work. Instead of counting items by hand, plants put read points where the linen has to pass anyway: doorways, conveyors, sorting tables, or tunnels that a loaded trolley rolls through in a single pass. That is the difference between an inventory counted once a quarter and one that updates every time a cage moves. Similar deployments are covered in our garment tags and healthcare sections.

The framing AP-HM uses is worth noting. It presents the laundry as strategically essential, a prerequisite for care rather than a back-office cost, on the grounds that available, compliant and secure linen is part of both clinical quality and patient comfort. At 12 to 14 tonnes a day, a ward that cannot find a clean sheet is a clinical problem, not a housekeeping one, and 60,000 missing sheets a year is the gap between what the plant sends out and what the wards can lay hands on.