Cool wireless application: no more waiting for hours in the ER
A friend of mine who works in the IT department of a large hospital says they are testing the expansion of their RFID and WiFi tracking system to reduce ER waiting times. My friend says:
It’s working in the Emergency department right now. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of being admitted to an ER, but it is the busiest part of any hospital. I injured my knee playing soccer in high school. I remember waiting for at least 2 hours after the ambulance had dropped me off until I could get even an X-Ray. Then waited for who knows how long until a physician could give me morphine and pop my knee back in place – that took 5 minutes. The most painful 6 hours of my life! Nothing compared to what the guy next to me was going through, he got stabbed a few times and was waiting for just as long.
With our RFID each incoming ER patient gets tagged with an RFID wristband. Strips on the door of each stall/room read when a patient gets rolled in. Then the timer starts ticking. If a physician or nurse doesn’t cross the RFID strips in a given amount of time an alert pops up on the nurses station via the WiFi IP network. When the staff comes into the room, (1 + 1 = 2) the alarm is automatically cleared. Now we have metrics on our response and, more importantly, people suffer less.
How cool is that?
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We looked at a system not quite as sophisticated as what you described but the vendor was too shakey when we looked at his DUNS report. Who was the vendor of the system you described in this article???