Articles
RSSRFID Sees Gains In Health Care By Mary Catherine O'Connor
March 14, 2006
•Article: RFID In Health Care
Copyright 2006, RFID Journal LLC.
Reprinted with permission. For more information, visit www.rfidjournal.com
When Denver Health's new Women and Children's Pavilion opens in Denver this coming August, it will use a Wi-Fi real-time location system (RTLS) designed by PanGo Networks, a Framingham, Mass., a technology firm specializing in asset location software. Starting in March, El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif., will also deploy PanGo's tracking system, which will be deployed by PanGo partner Eclipsys, an IT services firm for the health-care industry, located in Boca Raton, Fla. The PanGo system combines Wi-Fi tags with PanGo Locator, a software platform that calculates the locations of the tags throughout a facility.
At this week's Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference and exhibition in San Diego, Wi-Fi RFID systems providers and hospital wireless infrastructure providers announced several new contracts and partnerships aimed at growing the number of health-care facilities testing or deploying the technologies together. More and more, healthcare facilities are deploying RTLSs that use active 2.45 GHz RFID tags that send data over IEEE's 802.11 Wi-Fi protocol. The tags are attached to assets or integrated into identification badges, and the tracking systems are designed to help staff locate critical items such as ventilators, EKG devices, intravenous pumps and wheelchairs. They can even find other staff members when urgently needed. In most cases, the tags are read by Wi-Fi routers, made by such manufacturers as Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks, that are already deployed as part of the facility's wireless network.
Health-care facilities suffer significant financial losses through the expense of purchasing or renting devices they own but cannot locate. Moreover, not being able to locate assets and staff can degrade the quality of patient care.
Mary Catherine O'Connor is the associate editor of RFID Journal and RFIDJournal.com. She provides a wide variety of news and feature stories for both the Web site and print magazine. Prior to joining RFID Journal in late 2004, O'Connor served as an associate editor with Modern Media Partners, the media and events firm that produces many of RFID Journal's conferences and educational seminars, including the annual RFID Journal LIVE! conference. Before working for Modern Media, she worked as an editor and writer for a range of magazines and Web sites devoted to adventure travel and outdoor recreation.
•Article: RFID In Health Care
