WellSpan Health‘s York Hospital, located in York, Pa., has lifted a time-consuming, tedious task from the shoulders of staff members within its biomedical department, by integrating its legacy computerized maintenance management software (CMMS) with its AeroScout real-time location system (RTLS) for tracking mobile assets. AeroScout and Pittsburgh-based Four Rivers Software Systems announced the integration—which was completed last year, and is the first time the two companies have integrated their software platforms—at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, held last month.
In 2009, the facility deployed roughly 1,000 AeroScout Wi-Fi-based RFID tags, attaching them to assets in order to reduce the amount of time that the facility’s biomedical staff spent tracking down wayward assets (see RFID Helps York Improve Patient Safety, Satisfaction). Since then, according to Joel Cook, AeroScout’s director of health-care solutions, the hospital has expanded its deployment, attaching the tags to approximately 3,000 additional assets.
But when attempting to perform regularly scheduled maintenance on the mobile assets, biomedical department employees had to first log into Four Rivers’ Total Maintenance System (TMS) OnSite Professional CMMS software, to determine which items were due for maintenance. They then needed to log into AeroScout’s MobileView software, in which the tag identification and its associated location data are collected, processed and displayed, in order to pinpoint each asset. Once located, the MobileView software would also reveal whether each particular piece of equipment was available, or if it had been checked out for use.
This was an improvement over the days prior to the hospital’s RTLS deployment, when mobile assets sometimes went missing permanently—thereby affecting the hospital’s bottom line —or workers had to canvas the facility’s hallways and patient rooms searching for urgently needed items. But it was still a time-consuming step.
Last year, the WellSpan IT team worked with AeroScout and Four Rivers to integrate the MobileView and TMS platforms—a process that took only a matter of weeks to complete. Now, when a staff member accesses the TMS software to obtain a list of mobile assets requiring maintenance, each item’s location within the 580-bed hospital is also listed, with no further need for toggling between software platforms. What’s more, WellSpan IT is collaborating with AeroScout and Four Rivers to create an extended integration that will also be made available to the general market.As tagged equipment is moved from one area to another within the hospital, the MobileView software updates each asset’s location, thereby triggering an update of the location as listed in the TMS software, and ensuring that the two platforms are in synch. The integrated solution will also allow the hospital staff to quickly locate mobile assets should any come under a manufacturer’s recall.
“There’s no more having to log out of TMS and log into MobileView,” says Lynn O’Donnell, Four Rivers’ director of marketing.
When an employee checks for a long list of assets, the integrated platform saves him or her an appreciable amount of time, according to Chad Noll, WellSpan Health’s manager of biomedical engineering. The integrated system boosts efficiencies beyond what the AeroScout and Four Rivers systems provided individually, Noll says, noting that his team can now track down equipment more quickly when they need it, thereby saving time and allowing them to perform their jobs more effectively.
Four Rivers has helped other hospitals integrate its CMMS platform with other RTLS platforms as well, though it declines to name the vendors of those platforms. Other health-care facilities are also enjoying the benefits of this type of integration between the AeroScout platform and legacy software, such as CMMS platforms, says Steffan Haithcox, AeroScout’s senior director of marketing. “We have 450 health-care customers, and 50 of these have already integrated” AeroScout’s RTLS with other software platforms, he says, in order to make locating assets easier.