VisiBEElity for Hospitals and Health Care Organizations

Patients: Patient tracking works by issuing an identification badge upon a patients entry into the facility. Upon checking in, the patient will be affixed with identification, in much the same way as individual patients have always been identified, but with patient tracking the identification is embedded with wireless technology that emits a radio signal to allow for locating that patient no matter where they are. This tracking technology can prove vitally important by providing alerts if a patient moved into an area where they are not supposed to be. With the identification tag constantly updating the location of the patient, an alert can immediately be sent were the patient to move outside of a permitted area and medical personnel is provided a live, graphical representation of where the patient is.

Introducing... VisiBEElity wrist tags Can be easily worn Small and light Long battery life

• Medical equipment:
  
  The physical locations of vital hospital resources can also be tracked along with patients within a tracking system. The time wasted on locating necessary portable machinery is also eliminated with such a system. These devices can now contain a wireless identification tag that identifies its precise location throughout the medical facility and can contain other information about the equipment such as whether it is currently being used, who is using it, and whether it may be due for maintenance. Time is no longer wasted doing a physical search of the facility trying to locate needed machinery.
  
  Zone alerts can also be used to prevent the theft of medical equipment. In the same way a patient's location can send an alert to medical staff, the same can be done with the location of medical equipment. Security personnel can be notified if necessary. All of these functions are carried out automatically through a patient tracking system.
  
  The goal of a patient tracking system is to optimize the health care process. If patients and assets can be located in a timelier manner, a health care facility can operate much more efficiently. Medical facilities are frequently bogged down by time wasted in conducting physical searches for medical assets or waiting for a patient to answer a page they may not have heard. Patient tracking eliminates this time waste by providing the exact location of the medical equipment or the patient. The time saved conducting these searches will result in a much more efficient medical care process and more time can be focused on providing care for patients, and seeing more patients.
  
  

• Doctors and nurses
  
  Patient Tracking Generates Cost Savings:
  
  The cost savings generated by a patient tracking system deployment are considerable. Many firms that specialize in providing the technology promise that a 100% return on such an investment can be seen in the first year alone. For a real world example, the St. Louis Metropolitan Medical Response Team implemented a patient tracking system in 2004. Results have shown that before the system was implemented that simply locating a patient in a disaster situation would take from several hours to several days depending on how large the incident was that occurred. After the patient tracking system was deployed, in trial runs it was found that locating patients took less than five minutes, no matter the size of the disaster.
  
  Another example of improved efficiency with a patient tracking implementation can be observed at Mary Washington Hospital ER in Fredericksburg, VA, a 30-bed facility regularly running at capacity. An implementation of the Amelior patient tracking system from Patient Care Technology Systems LLC (PCTS) was selected to help alleviate the operational stresses of an ER running at capacity. During the first year of running the system the ER patient volume increased by 14% per month from the first six months of the year compared to the last six months. Length of stay for patients decreased by 11% within the ER, which sees three times the patient traffic of an average ER. The cost savings are easy to see with such a system.