Lincolnshire United Hospital NHS Trust deploys RFID solution to track medical equipment
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The Lincolnshire United Hospital NHS Trust, one of the largest emergency hospital trust funds in the UK, selected Harland Simon to provide the Stanley Medical RTLS system to help improve the management of mobile medical equipment.
Stanley Medical’s RTLS system uses a WiFi network to provide real-time location and status updates for 1,500 devices in the hospital. Fast-moving devices such as volumetric infusion pumps, bladder scanners, and ultrasound equipment at Lincolnshire Hospital, Pilgrim Hospital, and Grantham Hospital will be the first devices for real-time location monitoring.
The RTLS scheme uses battery-powered RFID tags to transmit a unique ID number through the WiFi protocol. Each device to be tracked is attached to an active WiFi RFID tag to transmit its unique ID within a preset time interval. After the hospital’s own WiFi infrastructure captures the signal, the data will be transmitted to the database for location determination. Staff at Lincolnshire Hospital can quickly find the location of the device using a simple graphical user interface, which also allows them more time to focus on patient care.
Harland Simon said that integration with the Trust’s own equipment inventory database MEMS was the difficulty in the deployment of the project. This means that employees can access device location information through MEMS. The company claims that the system will help improve inventory visibility and utilization, thereby saving hospital expenses and reducing the time employees spend looking for equipment. Dr. Chris Hacking, head of clinical engineering at Lincolnshire Hospital, said: “We need a tracking solution to support the establishment of a virtual medical equipment library. The solution provided by Harland Simon and Stanley Medical is ideal for us. Using the existing WiFi system, Marked on 600 devices, we have found that the system has played a big role in device tracking. Previously, we did not realize that the devices moved so frequently in different hospitals.”
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