Where Is That? RFID Offers Asset and People Tracking
Yours truly is quoted extensively in this story about RFID applications and adoption in hospitals. Freelancer Elizabeth Roop puts me in good company, along with John Pantano of Radianse and Gregg Malkary of Spyglass Consulting.
RFID offers potential benefits that can impact quality of care, outcomes,
and healthcare delivery costs. Many activities that occur in healthcare
require the coming together of a very specific group of workers and
assets in order to run a diagnostic test or deliver therapy” such
as cardiac catherization, interventional radiology, and gastroenterology
studies, says Tim Gee, principal of Medical Connectivity Consulting.
“Complex logistics are required to pull these events together,
deliver safe and efficacious care, capture charges, and document everything.
So tracking equipment, personnel, and patients throughout the care delivery
process can greatly impact both clinical and financial outcomes.”
The story provides a pretty good overview of the technology and discusses some sample applications.
Medical Sci-Fi Writing Contest
Yes, this is more than a bit off topic… Fellow bloggers at Medgadget are holding a medical science fiction writing competition.
to your identity. We are assembling an all-star judging panel, so you
can be assured your work will be reviewed by accomplished writers,
physicians, and fans of Battlestar Galactica. To help us with grading your papers, Enoch from Tech Medicine, GruntDoc, and Josh from KidneyNotes will be judges.
You must complete your 500-2,500 word medical sci-fi opus by December 1st. Winners will be published on Medgadet.
New Mobile Communications Study Targets Clinicians
Spyglass Consulting has just completed a study on mobile communications. The report looks at the communications devices used by physicians and nurses in both inpatient and outpatient settings. Here's a summary of the findings:
- Most clinicians (67%) have to carry more than one device to communicate with colleagues and patients. It would be interesting to see the split between physicians and nurses – I would bet physicians are much more likely than nurses to carry multiple devices.
- The ideal communications device does not exist. Clinicians have tried (and are using) them all – pagers, cell phones, smart phones, and VoIP phones. Voice communications is loosely coupled with IT, while effective messaging (especially messaging to caregivers at the point of care) requires much tighter integration with IT.
- Clinicians lack the tools to filter, manage and prioritize communications. Of course the tight integration with IT required to effectively deploy comprehensive communications tools has a huge impact on the actual devices that can be supported.
- Clinicians lack standardized processes to collaborate with colleagues. Communications that occur as a byproduct of referrals, consultations and coordination of care are poorly automated and provide little or no workflow automation that facilitates communications during the delivery of care.
This report shines an important light on unmet requirements in a potentially large market that I'm sure many vendors – from several market segments – have their eyes on.
Pictured right is the GE AirStrip fetal monitoring surveillance product (that runs on numerous smart phones) from GE.
Housekeeping
I have moved my connectivity photos from Buzznet to Flickr and replaced the photo bar in the left column with one from my Flickr site. The “flickr badge” – what they call that dealy-bob that shows the photos – only shows the most recently uploaded photos rather than showing them by the date they were taken. Bummer. So now you'll have to look at some shots from a couple of last years events, a hospital patient flow conference and AACN/NTI in New Orleans. You can see the photos in chronological order here.
I'll be at RSNA next week and everything will sync up in chronological order then.
Philips Medical Taps AeroScout for RFID Solution
New product categories cross some boundary when they are OEM'd by one of the big medical conglomerates. Such a transition was made today when Philips Medical Systems announced they were selling an asset tracking RFID solution from AeroScout (press release).
includes wireless tags, a location engine, and the MobileView user
interface. The tags, which can be attached to most mobile assets, transmit to the hospital’s existing 802.11 infrastructure.
This information is fed into the location engine and the asset’s
position can then be portrayed on a map, or in a table or report format
for any networked hospital user.
Asset tracking has become many hospitals first entry into RFID – the application is straightforward and easy to justify. Asset tracking is also the least technically challenging indoor positioning application for hospitals, requiring the least amount of spatial resolution or accuracy. Asset tracking systems typically return a zone level location, rather than room level or positioning within 2 to 3 feet. I suppose GE and Siemens will eventually follow Philips so they too can offer a branded asset tracking app to their vendor-exclusive hospital clients.
said Tom Kirkland vice president, customer services, for Philips
Medical Systems. “With the information that is gathered through the
asset tracking solution, asset utilization, work flow efficiencies, and
staff productivity can be improved.”
It will be interesting to see how far Philips can push the basic asset tracking solution. Providing contextual information about location data is critical to extracting real value from the data beyond simple “pump 12 is in closet 102B” location data. Undoubtedly there are opportunities to massage asset location data to
look at hospital-acquired infections, asset usage patterns over time,
and other metadata type applications. Perioperative applications like those from SIS and Picis use location data to optimize workflow, and are specialized comprehensive applications – you're not going to push a simple asset tracking system to these limits. These specialized workflow applications access location data through an API (application programming interface) between the RFID location engine and the target application.
The applications Kirkland alludes to will either require manual data entry and correlation or an API that talks to another application that does the real analysis. The risk here is that Philips new asset tracking system could be mistakenly over-sold by making claims beyond asset tracking.
Pictured right is an AeroScout tag shot at the last HIMSS exhibition.
