University Hospital in Syracuse, N.Y., part of State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University, has two surgery areas – 12 rooms on the fifth floor for adults and four rooms on the third floor for children. And no one there has yet developed the technology to transport equipment instantaneously from one floor to the other, a la Star Trek.
What SUNY officials have done, though, is employ a Wi-Fi-based asset monitoring system developed by AeroScout. Combined with platforms and integration technology from NEC and Cisco, the AeroScout solution allows hospital officials to keep track of valuable equipment in real-time throughout the 1.3 million square-foot facility.
“Cases have become extremely equipment-intensive these days,” says Terry Wagner, University Hospital’s CIO. “Our rooms weren’t designed for this. There’s little storage space and the Joint Commission doesn’t like seeing (equipment) in the hallways.”
AeroScout’s Asset Management solution “tags” equipment with Wi-Fi badges, then tracks them through a software program that can identify the location of a piece of equipment to within 10 feet. According to Mark Zenan, the hospital’s associate administrator for integrated materials and technical support, about 1,400 items have been tagged so far, with photos of each item added to the hospital’s database to make identification easier.
AeroScout officials say the SUNY project is a good example of how Wi-Fi-based technology is being used in healthcare – but it isn’t the only good example. Samarinda Aged Services in Melbourne, Australia and St. Trudo Hospital in Belgium are using AeroScout badges to keep track of ambulatory patients as well as equipment, while Genesis Medical Center in Davenport, Iowa, is using data gathered by the AeroScout solution to track inventory and place equipment for the hospitals’ disaster preparedness plan.
Zenan said University Hospital recently installed 34 “exciters” in its children’s wing to help staff keep track of patients. The checkpoints align with ID bracelets issued to all children, he said, and “wander alerts” are sent out when a patient crosses a checkpoint into another part of the hospital.
“Wi-Fi is allowing hospitals to drive this value,” said Steffan Haithcox, AeroScout’s senior director of marketing. “People would be amazed at where IV pumps end up.”
Haithcox and Joel Cook, Aeroscout’s healthcare solutions marketing director, say asset management programs are seeing new interest in the healthcare field as providers look to cut wasteful spending and better manage inventory. And while the technology is also being used to keep track of patients, it’s finding a use in temperature-sensitive areas as well.
A specialized version of Aeroscout’s Wi-Fi tags, known as temperature monitoring tags, are being used by University Hospital to track temperatures in more than 150 refrigerators in the pharmacy and on nursing units, where sensitive items like pharmaceuticals, vaccines and bone marrow.
“When we did it manually, people sometimes forgot to (check the temperature) or didn’t do it at specified times,” Wagner said.
