Philips Introduces Asset-Tracking System for Health Care

For example, one hospital Philips has been working with to install the asset-tracking solution has had a recurring problem with its compression pumps becoming damaged, forcing the the hospital to send the devices to its bio-medical engineering shop for repairs. "These are very expensive repairs," Taylor admits, "so the staff at the hospital has been using the asset-tracking system to determine where the compression pumps were prior to coming in for repairs."

"What they are hoping to find is some trends that they can then address," says Taylor. "What they think is that the compression pumps are getting placed under patient beds, and when those beds are lowered, the pumps are getting crushed. If the data bears that out, then the hospital plans to do some extensive training to teach the staff how to take better cares of them."

The University Medical Center (UMC) in Tucson, Ariz., has already installed the Philips-AeroScout asset-tracking solution. The deployment covers the entire hospital—comprised of eight floors and covering a million square feet—and involves 2,300-tagged assets, such as infusion pumps, beds, monitors and wheelchairs.

Other U.S. hospitals are also using some type of Wi-Fi-based asset-tracking system. AeroScout worked with Hatboro, Pa., wireless systems-integration specialist InfoLogix to deploy a Wi-Fi RTLS for Reading Hospital in Reading, Pa., to track and better utilize its infusion pumps (see RFID Sees Gains in Health Care). And Denver Health's Women and Children's Pavilion is using a Wi-Fi RTLS designed by PanGo Networks (see RFID Sees Gains in Health Care).

"What we've seen in the health-care industry is, unlike certain other industries where RFID has taken hold, asset tracking provides a very clear and attainable ROI," says Joshua Slobin, AeroScout's director of marketing. "I think the reason why that ROI is clear is because the problems of asset management and asset tracking within a chaotic environment like a hospital have been recognized and have been difficult to solve for quite some time. So having technology to solve these problems, and being able to do it on Wi-Fi, is really valuable."