NHS conducted a trial of RTLS for one of their affiliated hospital, Princess Alexandra Hospital at Essex, UK. This post is distillation from their study results.
About the Hospital
- 451 beds
- 4,000 staff
source: NHS
Why RTLS?
- To improve asset tracking and patient flow by incorporating real time location data into their work flow
- Stated objectives:
- allow for the automatic location tracking (by room) and logging of medical assets
- provide a holistic view of wait times for equipment or demonstrate better use of equipment shared between areas
- support improvements to device maintenance and patient flow monitoring
RTLS Technology Adopted
Active RFID tag with WiFi for data transfer
Result – A magnitude improvement
After adopting RTLS, the average time spent locating missing devices was found to decrease from an hour on average to 10 minutes. Before tagging a task used to take 8 hours / a week. After tagging that task was reduced to 1 hour / week.
Full NHS study report is available here.
Want to run a RTLS trial in your hospital?
INDTRAC RTLS platform has incorporated many of the best practices and beside real time location tracking, it supports auto-monitoring temperature for sensitive zones viz. stores. It also incorporates smart alarm system where real time alerts are delivered to designated people. Smart alarms integrates your existing electrical sirens in the hospital to enable localized siren activation. For example the administrator can configure the system so that a for an emergency local to a ward, local siren is activated.
Moreover, to make it easily usable, entire solution is available as smartphone App.
Please call us for a quick demo.