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Sao Paulo Cancer Hospital Uses RFID to Respond to Heart Attacks
The staff member wears the badge on a cord worn around the neck. Later, if that worker witnesses a patient undergoing cardiac arrest, he or she can press one of two buttons on the tag—one for code blue, or another for code yellow. The tag will transmit the alert, which is then received by Wi-Fi nodes within its read range. The hospital's wireless local area network (LAN) forwards that information to the Ekahau RTLS Controller software, which determines the tag's location based on the ID number of the Wi-Fi node, as well as the signal strength, and then sends that positioning data to the SIGAME software. SIGAME forwards the data—including each badge's ID and location, along with a room number for a patient in distress—to ICESP's existing VoIP PBX system, which calculates which badge-wearing employees are closest to the patient in question, and sends messages to those individuals.
The staff members nearest the patient are alerted on their own Ekahau T301BD badge tag, with a text message indicating in which room the incident is occurring. If a worker receiving the alert is unable to respond, he or she can press a button on the tag indicating such. The ICESP PBX software then receives that response, and issues a text message indicating an "escalated alert" to the remaining employees. A screen on the badge displays text messages listing the room number and level of each code, whether blue or yellow.
The data from the alert—including staff responses—is stored in ICESP's database, along with the length of time it took for an individual to respond from one location to another, and that employee's identity. With information about the responses, the hospital hopes to improve its response procedures by determining which sections of the hospital may have bottlenecks that cause delays (such as elevators), as well as which workers need further training, or which areas of the facility require greater response times. So far, however, the medical center has yet to undertake those kinds of analyses.
Approximately 20 staff members are currently using the tags, Strasburg says, and their response to the system has been positive. The only problem with the system initially, he notes, was that employees would carry the badges in their pockets and forget to return them to the charger at the end of a shift, and the badges, at times, would end up going through laundry as a result. Thus, all workers now wear the badges on a lanyard.
Planning is already underway to leverage the system for tracking and managing clinical assets, as well as for environmental monitoring of temperature and humidity in patient care areas, and in hospital refrigerators and freezers used to store tissue samples and medications.
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The staff members nearest the patient are alerted on their own Ekahau T301BD badge tag, with a text message indicating in which room the incident is occurring. If a worker receiving the alert is unable to respond, he or she can press a button on the tag indicating such. The ICESP PBX software then receives that response, and issues a text message indicating an "escalated alert" to the remaining employees. A screen on the badge displays text messages listing the room number and level of each code, whether blue or yellow.
The data from the alert—including staff responses—is stored in ICESP's database, along with the length of time it took for an individual to respond from one location to another, and that employee's identity. With information about the responses, the hospital hopes to improve its response procedures by determining which sections of the hospital may have bottlenecks that cause delays (such as elevators), as well as which workers need further training, or which areas of the facility require greater response times. So far, however, the medical center has yet to undertake those kinds of analyses.
Approximately 20 staff members are currently using the tags, Strasburg says, and their response to the system has been positive. The only problem with the system initially, he notes, was that employees would carry the badges in their pockets and forget to return them to the charger at the end of a shift, and the badges, at times, would end up going through laundry as a result. Thus, all workers now wear the badges on a lanyard.
Planning is already underway to leverage the system for tracking and managing clinical assets, as well as for environmental monitoring of temperature and humidity in patient care areas, and in hospital refrigerators and freezers used to store tissue samples and medications.
