The Heart of England NHS Trust's estates department (responsible for managing the trust's hospital buildings, infrastructure and equipment) is piloting radio frequency identification technology at Good Hope Hospital to locate and manage its beds. The RFID system will track both standard and specialized beds, as well as hoists used to lift patients onto and off of them. Once fully deployed, the solution will track approximately 2,000 beds and hoists across the three hospitals, based on the pilot's results.v9LGEENFC: A Global RFID tag, NFC tag, RFID Solution Provider
About a year ago, the trust's clinical engineering department—which manages mobile medical devices, such as infusion pumps and monitors—deployed an active RFID system provided by Harland Simon. It has attached active 2.4 GHz tags, which use a proprietary air-interface protocol, to each of about 2,000 medical devices, and is currently tracking their locations and movements among different sites within the three hospitals that make up the trust.
Harland Simon RFID tags, manufactured for Harland Simon by a third-party manufacturer, are set to transmit a unique identifier every 20 seconds. At that transmission rate, a tag's coin cell battery typically lasts for about 20 months.
When applying a tag to a bed or hoist, hospital personnel first use a PDA with a built-in bar-code scanner to read a bar-coded serial number printed on a label attached to the bed or hoist itself, and then the bar-coded serial number on the front of the RFID tag, which is the same number as the one transmitted by the tag. The tag and bed (or hoist) ID numbers are thereby stored in the Discovery software and forwarded to the facilities-management system. Employees can input the maintenance date for a particular item so that users can be alerted in advance when that object is again due for maintenance or servicing.
The three facilities currently have a total of 50 Harland Simon readers installed, 17 of which are being used at Good Hope. (The devices are also custom-made by a third party for Harland Simon.) These readers include those in use for the clinical engineering department's mobile-device tracking system, as well as others added to provide further granularity of bed location. The trust plans to install additional readers as needed.
Typically, readers capture a tag's ID at a distance up to 20 meters (65.6 feet). As the Discovery software receives data from the readers, it can approximate the location of that bed or hoist and then display that location on a dashboard that includes a map of the facility and an icon representing each tagged hoist or bed. In this way, the hospital staff can utilize the solution to identify where beds and hoists are located when engineers conduct inspections and any necessary maintenance. The software can also be used to determine when there are too many accumulating in one area, or not enough in another.
