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The British NHS Trust Property Center (responsible for managing the buildings, infrastructure and equipment of Trust’s hospitals) is being pilotedRFIDTechnology manages and locates the beds in Good Hope Hospital. The RFID system will track standard and special hospital beds. According to the results of the pilot, once fully deployed, the solution will track approximately 2,000 beds in three hospitals.
About a year ago, Trust’s clinical engineering department, which manages mobile medical devices such as infusion pumps, deployed an active RFID system provided by Harland Simon. Attach 2.4 GHz tags with a proprietary air interface protocol to approximately 2,000 medical devices, and track the location and movement of medical devices in Trust’s three hospitals.
Staff at Good Hope Hospital use Bluetooth handheld readers loaded with Discovery software to find specific items or collect inventory data.
David Smith, property manager of NHS Trust in the United Kingdom, said that based on the effectiveness of the system in monitoring medical equipment, the property department intends to pilot the same technology in hospital beds.
Smith’s goal is to reduce the time spent by department engineers looking for beds for repairs and inspections, and to ensure that beds are not overlooked and miss those inspections. The latter case is particularly noteworthy, because if the bed is not properly checked, safety issues may arise. Plan to check each bed twice a year.
The solution is called RFID Discovery, which deploys proprietary readers throughout the hospital and can run Discovery software to connect to the server. Harland Simon’s RFID Discovery solution sales manager Andy James said that the RFID Discovery software deployed in Good Hope can be integrated with the hospital’s Qube Global facility management software. In this way, the staff can find a specific hospital bed and its maintenance history in the management software, and read the relevant data of the equipment based on RFID Discovery.
Harland Simon’s RFID tags, manufactured by third-party manufacturers, are set to send a unique identifier every 20 seconds. According to this transmission rate, a button battery of a tag usually lasts for about 20 months.
When a tag is attached to the bed, the hospital staff can first use the PDA with a built-in barcode scanner to read the barcode number on the surface of the tag attached to the bed, and then put the barcode number in front of the RFID tag as the tag’s code. The ID number of the tag and bed (or promotion) can be stored in the Discovery software and forwarded to the facility management system. Employees can enter a repair date for a specific item, when the equipment needs maintenance or repair, so that users can be warned in advance.
Currently, these three hospitals have installed a total of 50 Harland Simon readers, 17 of which are in Good Hope (the equipment is customized by a third party for Harland Simon). These readers are used in the mobile device tracking system of the clinical engineering department, as well as to further provide the precise position of the bed. The Trust plans to install more readers when needed.
Normally, the distance for the reader to capture the tag ID is 20 meters (65.6 feet). Since Discovery software receives data from the reader, it can display the location of nearby hospital beds on a dashboard with a map. In this way, hospital staff can use the solution to help engineers find beds for inspection and necessary repairs. The software can also be used to determine which areas have too many beds and which areas have enough beds.
In addition, the handheld PDA reader with Bluetooth function is convenient for the staff of the property department to carry, and is used to find specific items in the hospital or collect inventory data. The user can select the label that needs to be read through the drop-down menu search function. The Discovery software will display the location of the marked item and indicate that the signal strength is high (within 5 meters from the device), medium, and low (more than 10 meters away from the device).
Smith said that the hospital is now labeling the beds, and the required readers are not in place, so the solution is only a preliminary test. He reported that so far, the data provided by the system has met his expectations. Smith said that the pilot is expected to be completed in September 2015, when his department will evaluate the results and plan to implement it in three hospitals. Deployment is expected in 2016. In addition, Smith said that he is trying to use the system for tracking other things, such as unlocking doors and cabinets, and tracking wheelchairs and stretchers.
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