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The BMJ Cardiology Clinic in Bangalore, India, began to use passive RFID tags to maintain patient medical records, manage patients, and track equipment in the outpatient department of the hospital. Since the fall of 2006, the Cardiology Hospital, as part of the Vivus Group, has been using the Hospital Information Processing Platform (CLIP) provided by Aventyn. Aventyn is headquartered in San Diego, California, and is a wireless technology company. At present, when registering into the outpatient department, the system can track an average of 100 new patients and returning patients per day.
Satish Chandra, director of non-invasive cardiology at BMJ, said, “We know that some hospitals in the United States are using RFID for asset tracking. We are very interested in how this can really benefit patients.”
The web-based CLIP system includes software and EPC Gen2 readers and tags; Aventyn will assist customers in implementing system plans using software and hardware. In May, Aventyn released an upgraded version of the CLIP solution, which supports Microsoft’s BizTalk RFID platform to manage automatic identification devices.
When patients register at the BMJ clinic, they get a card with an RFID tag. The unique identification code of the RFID tag is associated with the patient’s electronic record of the respective CLIP personal health management center. “The original design concept was to issue patient health cards at the front desk of the outpatient department, and then track the patient during the patient’s consultation with a cardiologist, so that the electronic medical record card automatically recognizes the patient’s identity.” Chandra said, “This avoids This has greatly reduced the cost of manual registration and reduced the use of paper medical records.”
Aventyn uses RFID readers provided by ThingMagic and Alien Technology. Readers are placed in waiting rooms, consultation rooms and laboratories. When the patient enters or leaves these areas, the reader can read the information. For example, when a patient comes to the consultation room, the RFID reader reads the patient’s card, and transmits the information to the CLIP personal health management center software through CLIP middleware to find the patient’s medical record. Then the doctor or nurse can log in to obtain the information through the computer.
The Cardiac Medical Center uses RFID technology to manage patients, greatly improving work efficiency and accuracy
The RFID reader can also record how long a patient stays in a specific area such as a waiting room, so that BMJ can track the patient’s care and activities in the hospital. The personal health management center is also integrated with the hospital’s financial system, so that patient care and workflow information can be accurately accounted for.
“We monitor patient triage and track the movement of health records in the outpatient department (OPD),” Chandra said. “The collected data includes the number of patients received, the time spent in various areas of the OPD waiting room, consultations, laboratories, and final bills.”
In addition, BMJ began to use EPC Gen 2 RFID tags on high-priced equipment, such as support frames, pacemakers, wheelchairs and gurneys, and some mobile devices such as those used in clinical diagnosis rooms, and then used the CLIP AssetLIVE system to track and locate these assets. AssetLIVE uses Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) drawing technology. This is the W3C graphics standard established around XML, including rich interactive graphics and multimedia applications. “We use vector graphics to outline the grid on the screen,” said Navin Govind, founder and CEO of Aventyn. “What we have done is not much different from the real-time positioning system, although our system is static in nature.” In the AssetLIVE application, positioning is achieved by analyzing RFID data and then marking the last known position on the graph. .
Chandra said that although it is too early to publish hard data to illustrate how RFID saves costs for hospitals and improves patient care and work processes, hospitals have indeed benefited from this technology, such as “increasing patient flow. The ability to reduce the number of paper forms, and more clearly grasp the drug inventory status.” Since BMJ does not want him to disclose more details, he only said that the hospital plans to expand the application of CLIP to track and manage the specific care procedures of inpatients and acute disease treatment departments.
As hospitals gradually adopt RFID technology to improve patient care and reduce costs, Chandra hopes that this technology can achieve a series of improvements. For example, he wants to use a smaller antenna. “In terms of implementing IT and RFID technology in a limited space, the internal structure of the hospital is very crowded. RFID antennas occupy a lot of valuable space.” If it is impossible to use a smaller antenna, he will consider expanding the coverage. The current CLIP system requires two readers and four antennas to cover an area of 3,000 square feet.
In addition, Chandra also hopes that costs will come down. “We heard that there are a lot of cheap labels, but the labels used in medical services are indeed extremely expensive,” he said. “When tags are widely used, tags can be easily affordable.” Moreover, all tags used by BMJ to manage hospitalized patients are tamper-resistant and can withstand harsh environments.
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