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St. John's Children's Hospital Deploys RFID to Protect Children
If someone attempts to take an infant or child wearing a bracelet through a protected doorway or other point of exit, the system will automatically trigger an audible alarm. Employees can then view computer screens to determine in which zone the patient is located, as well as that person's identity.
Twenty-eight 262 kHz readers at St. John's were installed at doorways, as well as at entrances and exits to stairways and elevators. Eighty-three 318 MHz receivers, meanwhile, were installed throughout the other areas—three floors of the hospital that house labor and delivery, as well as the neonatal intensive care and pediatrics units. The 318 MHz receivers are used primarily to verify that the tags are functioning properly. "If there is any problem with an individual tag," Lutzke says, "we want to know that, rather than just assume that a baby or child is being protected."
The Safe Place system's ease-of-use is another feature that caught Mosher's attention and, ultimately, sold him and others at St. John's on deploying it. "I knew, from the day I saw Safe Place, that it was what I wanted," he says. "The nursing staff doesn't have to jump through a lot of hoops to use it—it is very quick and straightforward."
Hospital workers can log onto any computer—including bedside computers—by entering their user names and passwords, or by swiping their ID badges through a magnetic-stripe reader connected to the computer. Pediatric patients arriving at the hospital receive bracelets upon admission, at which point the tag's unique ID number is correlated with the child's last name, using the software's pull-down menu. When a baby is born at the hospital, nurses place a Safe Place bracelet on that child in the mother's recovery room, then log the information into the software without having to leave the room.
St. John's is employing 100 of the Safe Place RFID-enabled bracelets. The hospital does not currently use the bracelets on infants in the neonatal intensive care unit, however, because the babies are so small, and since the bracelets must be taken off too frequently in order to perform various tests on the children. Regardless, Mosher says, the hospital decided to implement the system in the ward anyway. "It is there if and when we decide we want to use it," he states.
RF Technologies has implemented its Safe Place system in other hospitals as well. Wisconsin's Waukesha Memorial Hospital has deployed the system throughout its women's and children's wing, located on the facility's third floor (see Tamper-Resistant RFID Infant-Tracking System Improves Security). And Shawnee Mission Medical Center (SMMC) upgraded from an earlier version of RF Technologies' system to the current, dual-frequency Safe Place system now in use, because the newer version reduced the number of false alarms (see Shawnee Mission Medical Center Expands Pediatric Tracking).
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Twenty-eight 262 kHz readers at St. John's were installed at doorways, as well as at entrances and exits to stairways and elevators. Eighty-three 318 MHz receivers, meanwhile, were installed throughout the other areas—three floors of the hospital that house labor and delivery, as well as the neonatal intensive care and pediatrics units. The 318 MHz receivers are used primarily to verify that the tags are functioning properly. "If there is any problem with an individual tag," Lutzke says, "we want to know that, rather than just assume that a baby or child is being protected."
The Safe Place system's ease-of-use is another feature that caught Mosher's attention and, ultimately, sold him and others at St. John's on deploying it. "I knew, from the day I saw Safe Place, that it was what I wanted," he says. "The nursing staff doesn't have to jump through a lot of hoops to use it—it is very quick and straightforward."
Hospital workers can log onto any computer—including bedside computers—by entering their user names and passwords, or by swiping their ID badges through a magnetic-stripe reader connected to the computer. Pediatric patients arriving at the hospital receive bracelets upon admission, at which point the tag's unique ID number is correlated with the child's last name, using the software's pull-down menu. When a baby is born at the hospital, nurses place a Safe Place bracelet on that child in the mother's recovery room, then log the information into the software without having to leave the room.
RF Technologies has implemented its Safe Place system in other hospitals as well. Wisconsin's Waukesha Memorial Hospital has deployed the system throughout its women's and children's wing, located on the facility's third floor (see Tamper-Resistant RFID Infant-Tracking System Improves Security). And Shawnee Mission Medical Center (SMMC) upgraded from an earlier version of RF Technologies' system to the current, dual-frequency Safe Place system now in use, because the newer version reduced the number of false alarms (see Shawnee Mission Medical Center Expands Pediatric Tracking).
