From RFIDNews, Oct 07, 2005.

Radianse in Hospitals

A Massachusetts company has created an active RFID product for hospitals that can track patients and equipment. Bypassing normal RFID uses, Radianse, Inc. is into its second year of production, averaging about one new hospital a month. As its founder and chief technology officer, Mike Dempsey, says: "We don’t do supply chain, we don’t do security. Our goal is to make hospitals safer and more efficient."

Mr. Dempsey says the company’s wireless Indoor Positioning System (IPS) for hospitals can improve a hospital’s efficiency while adding increased patient safety. There are three ways to do this, he added. IPS can be used to:

1. Locate things, such as medical equipment, defibrillators–in other words, asset management.
2. Track people, Alzheimer's patients, cardiac patients who need powerful drugs.
3. Manage work flow. "This is all about making sure the right people and right equipment are in the right location and in the right order," said Mr. Dempsey.

The IPS can track equipment or patients using active RFID tags that can be read up to 70 feet away. Similar tags also track patients and hospital staff. It's like a Global Positioning System, only indoors. "Since this is an active RFID solution, the receivers are more like access points--on the walls, hallways," said Mr. Dempsey.

The IPS deploys reusable and single-use active-RFID tags and LAN or WiFi-ready receivers. A software algorithm (patent pending) determines accurate location. Radianse's "find" applications allow users to use a web browser to find equipment or people. It's also possible to install context-aware alerts applications for initiating actions based on location and association information (a high-risk patient is wandering from a designated area or the wrong patient is in the wrong procedure room, for example).

Patients wear the Radianse active-RFID tags from admission to discharge. The tags send continuous RF signals to Radianse receivers plugged into a hospital's wired or wireless network. From there the signals are analyzed by Radianse location software and the results are available in a variety of ways--as part of a workflow application's data; by querying a web-based application; or as alerts to a cell phone or pager. By tracking the patient, the Radianse IPS can also automatically record clinical events.

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