Health care system tests integrated RTLS

Keeping track of frequently needed and often-expensive equipment is a big deal in hospitals. Beds, infusion pumps, wheelchairs and other apparatus tend to move around a lot but must remain accessible to keep surgeries and rounds on schedule and, of course, to deal immediately with medical emergencies.

There are various real-time location systems (RTLS) out there to help quickly find wayward inventory. But what happens when the assets being tracked have different kinds of tags and sensors to help find them?

DATA CENTER TOOL: IT asset tracking system combines RFID, infrared for rack-level identification

Generally, you’d need to run more than one RTLS system and management console — one for collecting and displaying the location data from each tracking technology, such as RFID, Wi-Fi, ZigBee and infrared. But operating multiple stand-alone systems isn’t attractive given today’s stagnant IT budgets and the additional capital expenditures and training required.

What about integrating the location data from the various sources and displaying it on a common console? Bon Secours Richmond Health System in Richmond, Va., likes that idea and is piloting such a system from GE Healthcare Performance Solutions and Cisco.

GE and Cisco recently integrated Cisco’s Wi-Fi Mobility Services Engine (MSE) and GE’s AgileTrac location system. This allows health care organizations to get a unified view of assets with RFID tags and Wi-Fi clients on the AgileTrac management display, potentially helping improve the flow of patient care and saving time and money.

Bon Secours, which has been testing the integrated system for about a month and runs a Cisco WLAN infrastructure, hopes it will quell its tendency to overprovision equipment as a tactic to ensure asset availability, says Jeff Pearson, VP of information services.

It could also come in useful given that additional Wi-Fi devices are arriving in the facility thanks to the implementation of electronic medical records (EMR) in three of the health care system’s four hospitals last year, he says.

Bon Secours has been doing RFID tagging and tracking for years using the GE AgileTrac system, Pearson says. AgileTrac supplies plastic RFID tags, which Bon Secours affixes to wheelchairs, pumps, beds and even people by way of an RFID wristband.

“Assets tend to congregate away from where they are needed; for example, wheelchairs often end up near the front door” after departing patients have been wheeled to the curb. “The temptation is to buy or rent more, but the proliferation of [doing] that was becoming high,” Pearson adds.

AgileTrac lets clinicians filter on the asset in question and see where they all are on a map of the facility using RFID tags and applications.

Now, with the advent of EMR, each patient room is getting a cart with a laptop affixed and secured. The laptops are Wi-Fi-capable, and Bon Secours is also adding Cisco Wi-Fi phones to the mix. So the facility is testing how useful the consolidated view would be for those assets.

The facility is determining whether it makes more sense to track laptops based on the embedded Wi-Fi client or to tag the carts themselves. “What happens when the laptop dies?” says Pearson. “We’d bring in another laptop, give it the same workstation name and make sure to put it in the same cart.”

On the other hand, how big a problem is the facility facing with carts going where they’re not supposed to go? “That’s under evaluation now,” he says.

The integrated GE-Cisco software will be generally available next month, says Sylvia Hooks, Cisco senior manager, mobility marketing. A GE spokeswoman adds: “This is an exclusive relationship with Cisco. GE … does not have any other relationship that bridges Wi-Fi and RTLS together within one system.”

In other words, at least for now, you need to be running a Cisco WLAN to get the consolidated device tracking view on the AgileTrac console.