Italy’s Treviglio Hospital uses RFID to track the location of patients in the emergency department
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The Ospedale Treviglio-Caravaggio Hospital in Treviglio, Italy now uses an RFID system to track patients in the emergency department of the hospital and the process of their examination and treatment in various departments.
Usually, when a patient arrives at the emergency department and is registered and admitted to the hospital, the hospital will diagnose and treat the patient in accordance with a series of procedures. Because patients often need to switch between different clinics when undergoing examinations or treatments, it is difficult to track the position of the patient during this process. For example, if the waiting line for X-ray scanning is too long, the patient may go for a blood test first, and the blood test is usually behind the X-ray examination in the process; when such a situation occurs, the hospital cannot immediately Know the location of the patient and the examinations they have undergone.
Using an RFID system provided by Softwork, medical staff can quickly locate the patient’s location, which greatly facilitates patient management in the emergency department. Agata Olivieri, head of the emergency department at Treviglio-Caravaggio, said that the safety of patients can also be better guaranteed .
The purpose of using the RFID system is to know the position of the patient in the emergency zone in real time, said Paola Visentin, Softwork’s marketing and communications manager
When new patients were admitted to the hospital, they tied an Identec Solutions 915 MHz active RFID tag around their necks. Each tag contains a unique ID number, which corresponds to the patient’s name and related medical information in the hospital database.
When patients move from one department of the hospital to another, such as moving from the examination room to the radiology room, they will pass through an RFID portal reader (a total of 8 RFID portal readers used in the entire building). The ID number of the tag captured by the portal reader. If the medical staff wants to know the location of the patient, he can obtain the location information on the computer in real time.
Through the reader antenna to obtain the order of tag signals, the patient’s route and the direction to which it is headed can be understood. The Ospedale Treviglio-Caravaggio hospital installed the system in the fall of 2006, and the system cost was $71,400.
“RFID has improved the efficiency of patient management in the emergency department,” Visentin said. Since adopting this system, she said, “We have achieved the main goal to ensure the safety of patients in this department.” The hospital also better understands that patients are in With this information on the flow of different departments, the hospital can consider adding equipment in specific areas.
According to Visentin, patients did not understand why RFID should be used in the initial stage of the system; however, soon hospital staff and patient families experienced the benefits of real-time knowledge of the patient’s location.
There is a computer monitoring screen in the emergency waiting room, and the patient’s family can enter the patient’s ID number to know the patient’s location in the first place.
All tag reading data shows the track in the patient’s hospital, and this information is stored in the patient’s file. When the patient is discharged from the hospital, the label information is restored so that it may be used for injection by other patients. The number of labels reused in the hospital is currently 100. An average of 55,000 patients are sent to the emergency department each year.
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