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Excerpt from Healthcare Purchasing News Online 5 essential questions to ask before investing in active-RFID asset tracking by Steve Schiefen Gaining traction as a way to increase efficiency and save money, active radio frequency identification (RFID) as part of a real-time location solution is finding its way into healthcare budgets. The premise is simple: Attach tags to equipment, send signals to readers and update applications to inform clinicians and staff where equipment is located. The promise is compelling: Find what you need when it’s needed – whether for patient care or preventive maintenance. And the payoff can be dramatic, from saving countless hours of search time to eliminating hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment replacement or excess rentals. The slippery slope comes when hospitals must choose the technology platform. Wired or wireless? Active or passive? Line-of-sight or radio frequency? 433 MHz or 2.4 GHz? To find the right answers, a hospital should first consider five strategic questions that contemplate current and future needs: 1. Will we ever need to track the real-time location of patients and staff?It may be the application that starts the discussion, but asset tracking is the least demanding application for active-RFID and real-time location. This makes it the lowest common denominator for comparing technologies, any of which can reasonably claim to offer a return on investment. But there are even greater returns to realize when a location system can also be used to find people—the ability to improve patient flow, increase safety and collect objective measures for process improvement. Since not all asset tracking tags are appropriate in size or function for use on patients, be sure to select a system that won’t limit your expansion to track people. Continue to full article at www.hponline.com or 5 Essential Questions at www.radianse.com
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