The Women’s Hospital of Greensboro and RadarFind Partner to Elevate Patient Care Through Location Tracking
The Women’s Hospital of Greensboro, part of North Carolina’s Moses Cone Health System, has chosen the RadarFind Real Time Location System (RTLS) to monitor the location and status of its mobile medical equipment, thereby improving patient care and the efficiency of hospital operations.
The indoor tracking system pinpoints the location of medical equipment throughout the hospital and displays this information via hospital staff’s computer screens. By reducing the time spent searching for equipment, RadarFind’s new RTLS will enable the staff at The Women’s Hospital of Greensboro to spend more time caring for patients. The system also gathers data about equipment utilization rates, serving as a powerful tool for hospital administrators to more accurately plan for new medical equipment purchases, often resulting in significant savings.
“We are looking forward to joining other hospitals across the country enjoying the benefits of a technologically advanced location system. RadarFind stood apart from the competition because of its ease of installation, use and maintenance. The diverse medical backgrounds of the team at RadarFind are evident in the design of this system, which expertly addresses a hospital’s unique needs and will enhance our current operations with minimal disruption to our patients,” said Tim Rice, president and CEO for Moses Cone Health System.
Patented Technology Lowers Equipment Expenditures and Assists Infection Control
While most RTLS solutions available today provide information about a device’s location, the RadarFind RTLS features a programmable asset tag that goes a step further by alerting staff to the device’s status: available, in-use or needs cleaning/sterilization. The system accrues this information for equipment utilization reports to help hospitals accurately budget for new equipment expenditures. This practice saved Wayne Memorial Hospital of Goldsboro, N.C. more than $300,000 less than a year after implementing the RadarFind RTLS.
The status tag also serves as an important tool in a hospital’s efforts for infection control. The system tracks individual devices and reports their time-stamped location history. This information is used by a hospital as part of their infection control surveillance system and identifies equipment that has come into contact with specific patients, especially those who have contracted or are colonized with antibiotic-resistant organisms. The data from the status portion of the tag is used to monitor whether the device passes through the appropriate decontamination process before it is assigned to another patient. In addition, causal relationships between contaminated medical devices by known infected or colonized patients are easily determined and additional preventative measures are introduced to reduce spread of these organisms to other hospitalized patients or locations within the hospital.
The innovative RadarFind platform technology was designed by doctors specifically for hospitals after two years of intensive research with more than 50 hospitals, and overcomes the technical limitations associated with other RFID solutions. The system is designed to seamlessly integrate with existing hospital infrastructure and operations. RadarFind’s readers plug into existing electrical outlets, requiring no new wiring or ceiling or wall penetration and preserving the outlets for use by other devices. And unlike many other RTLS systems, RadarFind operates independently of a hospital’s critical WiFi network.
“We collaborated with hospitals in developing a system to solve the unique problems they face daily. Our research identified the need for a system that offered more than simply tracking equipment in highly active areas such as an emergency room,” said Terry Kane, M.D., chief executive officer for RadarFind. “We determined which features would most impact the challenges inherent to a hospital environment and designed a system that is scalable, affordable, can be expanded to track patients, and offers information about a device’s status along with its location.”
About RadarFind Corporation
RadarFind Corporation, a health care technology company, offers a unique, patented Real Time Location System that uses a platform technology for tracking medical equipment and patients. Specifically designed for hospitals, the RadarFind RTLS seamlessly integrates with existing hospital infrastructure and operations, while functioning independently of a hospital’s critical WiFi network. Headquartered in North Carolina, RadarFind develops integrated hardware and custom software solutions for their hospital customers. For more information please call (919) 228-2100 or visit www.radarfind.com.
About The Women’s Hospital of Greensboro
Established by Moses Cone Health System, The Women’s Hospital of Greensboro was North Carolina’s first free-standing hospital dedicated to women. The staff at the Women’s Hospital of Greensboro is dedicated to providing family-centered and personalized care. For more information, please visit www.mosescone.com.