The time nurses spend searching for equipment is quickly becoming a thing of the past, thanks to a technology that operates over the same network that serves hospital laptops and voice-over-Internet phone (VoIP) technology. Active radio frequency identification (RFID) tags manufactured by AeroScout use the standard Wi-Fi network already established within a hospital facility to track equipment and patients, and perform a wide variety of wireless solutions.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags manufactured by AeroScout can be used to track hospital equipment, like this pump.

“We’re targeting five key applications: maintenance, asset management, temperature monitoring, patient and staff safety and workflow resource management,” explained Gabi Daniely, vice president of marketing and product strategy for AeroScout, a Redwood City, California, technology company that describes itself as a “pioneer in the Wi-Fi RFID market.”

The most nurse-friendly application of the AeroScout RFID solutions is asset management, which involves tracking costly and essential hospital equipment to be transferred from one patient to another.

“If you look at asset management, there are several applications for nurses,” Daniely added. “First of all, we look at a day in the life of an infusion pump, a ‘hot item’ in a hospital environment. A nurse discharges a patient and disconnects the pump but then a few things could happen to it: She could take it to the utility room or she could leave it there and someone else could take it to be cleaned. The problem then is how does she know the status of the pump or how many she has available when a new patient comes in? All of this can be automated with our solution.”

The AeroScout RFID tags can be set up so that an alert can be sent out to materials managers to let them know when there are less than five pumps available. That alert can be sent to an e-mail, cell phone or pager or can be integrated directly into the ordering system, saving valuable time for nurses looking for available pumps and managers needing to order new ones.

“We can do the ordering when a nurse needs a certain piece of equipment,” Daniely continued. “We’ve seen that nurses waste between 30 and 60 minutes a day waiting for equipment and patient wait times are being extended because of unavailability of those assets. This system eliminates those wait times and saves nurses valuable time.”

Another valuable time saver for nurses provided by the AeroScout RFID tags is the ability to perform temperature monitoring on refrigerators and freezers that store blood, organs, medications, vaccines or food. Some nurses and other hospital staff are required to manually check and log these temperatures several times per day.

“We’re looking at 100-plus refrigerator units that store drugs, vaccines and other sensitive items that have a temperature threshold they have to be in,” Daniely explained. “The Joint Commission mandated that these refrigerators be checked anywhere between twice and three times per day. With our Wi-Fi RFID, we can add sensor tags to be put in the refrigerator and freezer; these tags then send out a signal that includes the temperature reading. The measurable benefit here is huge in reducing staff frustration.”

Other solutions offered by the AeroScout Wi-Fi RFID tags include patient tracking, which is helpful for Alzheimer’s and psychiatric patients who may need to be monitored for their own and their attending staff’s safety; and workflow management, which lets operating room and emergency department staff know the location and status of patients, physicians, available rooms and equipment.

In the future, Daniely expects the Wi-Fi tags to become even more useful in other areas of the hospital environment.

“We see several applications that aren’t in the mainstream, such as monitoring the humidity in rooms and refrigerators; monitoring the carbon dioxide or nitrogen in a certain area; and tracking specimen that are arriving to pathology from the operating room or other areas of the hospital,” he concluded. “There is a lot of future potential.”

By: Christina Orlovksy, Via- http://www.nursezone.com