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Spartanburg Medical Center Deploys Wi-Fi RFID System
McKesson and Spartanburg employees affixed the active tags to the IV pumps. Using a standard Web-based browser, nurses, doctors, biomedical staff and administrative personnel can access a map of the facility to pinpoint the location of all the tagged pumps. Additionally, Spartanburg configured the Horizon software to send automated text and e-mail alerts whenever an IV pump enters an off-limits area, such as a stairwell or a building exterior.
The system alerts the hospital department that sterilizes and maintains the IV pumps when the pumps are brought to the holding area before being cleaned. "An e-mail is sent to the materials-management group, so that they know an IV pump has come in and that a replenishment needs to be put out on the floor," says Ben Sperling, McKesson's RFID director.
Spartanburg now wants to extend the RTLS to help track patients undergoing surgery. The hospital is completely renovating its operating rooms, and by next October will use RFID to track patients as they are prepped and taken into surgery, and when the surgery is completed. In the operating room, staff will wear badges with embedded active 2.4 GHz RFID tags. Tagged assets will also be tracked, Shingler says, and patients will be given the same tags as the assets. Later this spring, Ekahau plans to release a version of the active RFID Wi-Fi tag that resembles a regular staff badge but also has a small LCD screen and can be used for paging and text messaging.
The Horizon RTLS used in the operating room will be linked with Spartanburg's implementation of McKesson's Horizon Surgical Manager, an application designed to help hospitals manage OR capacity and throughput, clinical documentation, equipment utilization and performance. The RFID data collected via the RTLS will be fed into the Horizon Surgical Manager, and will help document how well surgical patients are served.
The hospital already uses numerous automated processes to enhance the patient experience, but without an RTLS in place, it did not have complete, up-to-the-minute data that could be collected during surgery and other procedures. Therefore, Shingler says, Spartanburg has found it difficult to identify more places for improvement. "RFID will help," he says. "The nurses, the doctors, even our board of trustees are excited about the opportunities the technology will bring to us."
A growing number of other health-care facilities around the world are using Wi-Fi RFID systems to track and manage medical equipment as well, including the Dwight David Eisenhower Army Medical Center at Fort Gordon, Ga.; Tuusula Hospital in Finland; France's Arras Central Hospital; and Mayores Hospital, in Calhorra, Spain (see RFID Sees Gains in Health Care).
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The system alerts the hospital department that sterilizes and maintains the IV pumps when the pumps are brought to the holding area before being cleaned. "An e-mail is sent to the materials-management group, so that they know an IV pump has come in and that a replenishment needs to be put out on the floor," says Ben Sperling, McKesson's RFID director.
Spartanburg now wants to extend the RTLS to help track patients undergoing surgery. The hospital is completely renovating its operating rooms, and by next October will use RFID to track patients as they are prepped and taken into surgery, and when the surgery is completed. In the operating room, staff will wear badges with embedded active 2.4 GHz RFID tags. Tagged assets will also be tracked, Shingler says, and patients will be given the same tags as the assets. Later this spring, Ekahau plans to release a version of the active RFID Wi-Fi tag that resembles a regular staff badge but also has a small LCD screen and can be used for paging and text messaging.
The Horizon RTLS used in the operating room will be linked with Spartanburg's implementation of McKesson's Horizon Surgical Manager, an application designed to help hospitals manage OR capacity and throughput, clinical documentation, equipment utilization and performance. The RFID data collected via the RTLS will be fed into the Horizon Surgical Manager, and will help document how well surgical patients are served.
A growing number of other health-care facilities around the world are using Wi-Fi RFID systems to track and manage medical equipment as well, including the Dwight David Eisenhower Army Medical Center at Fort Gordon, Ga.; Tuusula Hospital in Finland; France's Arras Central Hospital; and Mayores Hospital, in Calhorra, Spain (see RFID Sees Gains in Health Care).
