Visioning 2026 Blog
Patient Safety -- RFID Technology for Primary Care Providers
How could you see this RFID technology and WiFi or WiMax be implemented for people that supports inhome care? Would this be something that a child day care center would consider implementing? Use this type of technology to activate camera systems for high risk facilities?
Mark
RFID Journal Health-Care/Pharmaceutical News
Oct. 18, 2006
EDITOR'S NOTE
The DeBakey Code
The Michael E. DeBakey Veteran Affairs Medical Center serves as the primary health-care provider for more than 112,000 veterans in southeast Texas. Some of those patients are at risk of wandering off or otherwise endangering themselves. To make sure these patients get the special treatment they need, the hospital established its "Code Purple" initiative, which identifies patients likely to fall in harm's way and provides guidelines for their care.
Recently, the hospital took the initiative a step further by implementing a system utilizing active RFID tags embedded in wristbands and sensors.
Under the new system, if a patient at risk of wandering off attempts to move out of a room, RFID antennas installed in the doorway detect the movement via the RFID wristband, causing an LED to flash, alarms to sound throughout the unit and the door to lock automatically. If a patient at risk of falling tries to get out of bed, a pad senses the weight shift and relays that data to an RFID interrogator, triggering an alert so hospital staff can attend to the patient.
Currently, the medical center has 150 purple RFID-enabled patient wristbands available for use in the emergency room, and in the mental-health and transitional-care units. Nurses and other caregivers working in the three units will be given RFID-enabled pendants to wear either around their necks or clipped to belts. Nurses requiring assistance will be able to press the pendants' buttons and communicate with the RFID interrogators to sound an alarm and signal where they are in the hospital.
DeBakey's RFID-enabled Code Purple system goes live this month, hopefully providing one more clue about how radio frequency identification can improve patient safety.
Full Story:
http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/2732/1/1/
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