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Recently, the Palm Health Center in South Carolina deployed a WiFi-based real-time location system (RTLS) for medical devices and to ensure the safety of these devices.The solution includes Ekahau’s Vision RTLS software and WiFi-basedRFIDLabel. Six years ago, the hospital first installed RTLS technology in a building. Later, the use of RTLS was gradually expanded to three other buildings. In March of this year, Palm Health deployed the program at the newly opened Columbia Regional Hospital.
Palm Health Center is the largest non-profit medical institution in Colombia. The hospital has 1,138 beds and 8,400 employees. Initially, when Palm Health deployed the RTLS solution, it was intended to be used to monitor items in most facilities.
Today, all Palm Health hospitals face a common challenge: to prevent the loss of biomedical equipment such as infusion pumps. The medical center intends to find a centralized system for monitoring items in multiple buildings, and gradually transition the original WiFi network to a controller-based Cisco wireless local area network (WLAN). Therefore, before deploying Cisco’s network solutions, Palm Health continued to use the original WiFi system.
Ekahau CEO Mark Norris said that in 2008, Palm Health Center deployed the Ekahau Vision RTLS solution at Lijing Hospital. The system uses three types of battery-driven RFID tags: T201, T301A, and A4. All three types of labels can be attached to medical devices and have alarm buttons. The Vision software is stored on the back-end server of the hospital and contains the basic data of each guest room on each floor. Each tag can transmit a 2.4GHz signal at each predetermined time interval, and at the same time, the software can locate the mark of the medical device within the network.
Palm Health not only wants to track the location of each device (to reduce the search time), but also wants to know the information that the medical device is taken away from a specific area. When the equipment is under maintenance, the software will also send text messages to the authorized party. Although Ekahau can enhance positioning by installing infrared sensors, Palm Health rejected this plan.
After deploying the RTLS solution at Regent Hospital, Palm Health expanded the use of this technology to children and heart hospitals located in the same park. At the same time, Palm Health also upgraded the original WiFi network to Cisco’s controller-based WLAN solution. Norris explained: “As the network upgrade is completed, we will gradually deploy tags that support the CCX protocol.”
Now, Ekahau’s Vision software is installed in the central server of the Palm Health Network Operations Center.
The hospital said that so far, the technology has effectively reduced the time employees spend looking for equipment, so that they can have more time to serve patients. In addition, the loss rate of medical equipment has also been effectively reduced.
(Exclusive manuscript of rfid world network, please indicate the source author for reprinting!)
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