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4.1 Million Square Foot Deployment to be the Largest Healthcare RTLS Installation in the World

CenTrak , a leading provider of Real-Time Location Systems ( RTLS ) for tracking assets and people indoors, announced that its technology has been selected at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center (WFUBMC) for enterprise asset tracking. With 885 beds, WFUBMC provides healthcare services to the Winston-Salem, N.C. area. WFUBMC’s 4.1 million square foot campus makes it the largest healthcare facility in the world to implement an RTLS project, to date.

WFUBMC engaged CenTrak after recognizing a need to track infusion pumps, wheelchairs, and other valuable mobile medical equipment. For three years, the facility sought a solution to the problem, reviewing nearly a dozen solutions and even testing Wi-Fi and Zigbee technologies. Both were dismissed by hospital administration given their requirement for certainty-based bed level location granularity for asset, patient, and staff tracking initiatives. WFUBMC has been running a pilot of CenTrak ’s system since November of 2008. The technology is being deployed in conjunction with Charlotte-based Patient Care Technology Systems’ Amelior Tracker solution.

"Our goal is to be able to use the RTLS to automate decision making and drive efficiencies within our organization" said Robert Parker, WFUBMC's VP, Support Operations and Community Health. " CenTrak ’s hybrid Gen2IR™ and RF system gives us the most accurate data and enables us to make decisions to better the treatment of our patients while optimizing the management of our people and assets. We have been impressed with their quick and simple installation – there is no need for in room wiring that would have disrupted patient care and created infection control concerns."

The first phase of the CenTrak deployment will begin with the tracking of IV pumps. CenTrak ’s Temp Tag will be used in the hospitals refrigerators and freezers to monitor the temperature of medications. In March 2009, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices established a new guideline recommending that hospitals track the temperatures of vaccines twice daily, which requires significant staff time. In the coming months, WFUBMC will consider expanding the deployment of the CenTrak technology to the tracking of patients for workflow purposes.

"We are pleased to partner with WFUBMC to give them a full view of asset location in real-time," said Ari Naim, Ph.D., president and CEO of CenTrak . "They have a huge hospital to manage and require the best data available to make fully-informed decisions. We are proud to have been selected by such a prestigious and quality driven organization."

CenTrak ’s system differs from legacy technologies in its combined use of a patented new generation of infrared (Gen2IR) and radio frequency identification (RFID). Monitors transmit a unique room number using Gen2IR which is received by any tag in that room. Tags communicate the room number and its own unique ID via RF to a location server using the hospital’s existing wired or Wi-Fi network, where it can be accessed in real-time by hospital personnel.

Like light, Gen2IR will not pass through walls and does not suffer from traditional infrared line-of-sight limitations. Therefore, when a tag reads a room number, there are no errors. This is certainty-based RTLS. Unlike estimation-based information, certainty-based location data can be used by hospitals to make important decisions based on events, such as when to classify a piece of patient equipment as soiled or contaminated. Certainty-based RTLS can also enable automated decision making, like determining if a patient requires a physician visit if they have not been attended to in a given period of time. Most healthcare workflow improvements can only be realized when location data is certainty-based.

About CenTrak

CenTrak is a leading provider of accurate, multi-functional, and cost-effective tracking infrastructure for healthcare facilities. The patented InTouchCare Real Time Location System ( RTLS ) uniquely combines Gen2IR and active RFID technologies to deliver certainty-based or error free data, a requirement for workflow and other important healthcare applications. To learn more, visit www.centrak.com.

Source: CenTrak