Florida's Celebration Health Hospital Measures Efficiency

The medical facility is using an AeroScout Wi-Fi system to track nurses' movements within its new tower, and to determine ways in which their jobs could be made more efficient.

By Claire Swedberg

Tags: Asset Tracking, Health Care, IT/Infrastructure, Operations, Security and Access Control

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Sep 06, 2011—Celebration Health, a Florida Hospital facility, is employing a real-time locating system (RTLS) to measure the operational efficiency of its new patient tower, which opened in mid-August 2011. At the tower, nurses wear RTLS badges enabling the hospital to gather and analyze data regarding the movements of staff members, and—based on that information—to ascertain how the unit could be more efficient.

The AeroScout system in use by Celebration Health—a resort-style facility located in the Disney-planned city of the same name—utilizes the hospital's existing Cisco Wi-Fi infrastructure, with tags that transmit data to the Wi-Fi nodes, while AeroScout MobileView software manages the information related to RTLS reads. Florida Hospital was already using AeroScout tags to track assets and temperatures at some of its 18 statewide facilities (see Florida Hospital Measures Success of Temperature-Tracking System).

Todd Frantz, Florida Hospital's associate chief technology officer

The new tower contains 31 patient rooms. The hospital required an RTLS offering room-level granularity, which is not always possible using a Wi-Fi system, since tags IDs can be read from nodes in adjacent rooms. Therefore, AeroScout also installed exciters within each patient room, as well as at some gathering areas and entrances, in order to help identify through which room every individual passes during any given shift, as well as when and how often.

Celebration Health tends to embrace cutting-edge technologies, the company reports, to provide superior patient care focused on overall heath by treating "mind, body and spirit." The facility is a good site for testing new technologies, according to Todd Frantz, Florida Hospital's associate chief technology officer, with several such technologies now being tested that he is not yet able to specify or describe.

The hospital's nursing staff began testing the room-level AeroScout system before the tower was completed, by simply wearing the badges while in their work places, using the existing Wi-Fi network in those areas.

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Florida's Celebration Health Hospital Measures Efficiency

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