AeroScout RFID system helps hospitals improve patient safety and satisfaction
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Wellspan Health York Hospital now uses the Wi-Fi real-time positioning system provided by AeroScout to more effectively manage the assets of the hospital (580 beds). This system is the result of the cooperation of the hospital’s biomedical engineering department, the emergency department and the transportation department. All three parties also claimed that this system helped them better understand the location of important medical equipment and benefited a lot from it.
The hospital covers an area of 1.2 million square feet and has 11 buildings with 9 floors. It treats an average of 80,000 patients each year, of which 20% are inpatient treatments. At present, the emergency department of the hospital has been upgraded to a first-level trauma center-there are only two in total in south-central Pennsylvania.
In order to develop this system, AeroScout worked closely with the hospital’s biomedical engineering department, emergency department and transportation department, all of which have their own problems. The emergency department hopes to quickly obtain the equipment needed to treat severely ill or injured patients. According to the patient’s condition and treatment needs, such equipment includes syringes, delivery tubes, patient-controlled analgesia or high-pressure injection pumps, and respiratory assistance equipment, wheelchairs or gurneys, etc. The Department of Biomedicine is responsible for the provision, cleaning and maintenance of these equipment, and other departments directly request equipment from this department.
AeroScout MobileView
The Biomedical Department usually receives dozens of calls for specific equipment every day, and sometimes only one employee can search around to find the required equipment. This puts a heavy burden on the Biomedical Engineering Department, said department head Chad Noll. . The Department of Transportation, which is responsible for moving patients from one department to another, also faces the same wheelchair tracking problem.
In 2008, the Department of Biomedicine took the lead, and the three departments joined forces to find a solution. In the end, they collaborated with AeroScout to develop a system that uses the hospital’s existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to receive RFID tag signals. In July of this year, the hospital began to install additional Wi-Fi access points and label wheelchairs, syringes, delivery tubes, portable physiological monitors and respiratory assistance devices, and officially launched the system in August.
Each tag sends its unique ID code, which corresponds to the information of the device to which the tag is attached. The information is stored in the AeroScout MobileView software running on a server in the hospital. In addition, MobileView can also locate other Wi-Fi items, such as laptops and IP phones.
At the end of 2008, Wellspan installed AeroScout temperature monitoring labels on refrigerators and freezers. According to Joel Cook, the marketing director of AeroScout medical solutions, the hospital plans to install other sensor labels in the future.
“We need to record the temperature of the medical refrigerator every day,” Noll said. “In the past, this was a purely manual process. Now this system can automatically collect electronic data collection methods in real time.”
The hospital currently labels 1,100 items, and the system also tracks 50 non-labeled Wi-Fi devices, such as wheelchair computers and IP phones.
Noll claims that this system not only saves hospitals tens of thousands of dollars in equipment purchase costs, but also improves patient safety and satisfaction, because employees can spend more time focusing on patient needs instead of searching for equipment.
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