RFID Patient Tracking - Invaluable Service

Technology had caught up in the healthcare industry. This time, such a mundane but very important task termed RFID patient tracking is now a reality. The technology is applying patient tracking by having them wear wrist bands embedded with RFID tags.

The tags interact with the hospital’s information system for automatic tasks like admissions, transfers and discharges. These tags had been approved for use as tags for humans. In reality, these tiny tags help disoriented, elderly and other high-risk patients to a more secure status, including the storage of their full medical records.

Mechanics

RFID tags are usually supplied as wristbands or special badges. They are equipped with tamper-proof mechanism to prevent these from being removed. If an attempt is done, they emit an alert signal.

On the other hand, the readers for RFID tags are placed in specific places in the hospital where patients can be located within a measurable distance. This distance is defined by the system integrator working with the client (hospitals). 

This distance is small enough for the patient to be located with some confidence. It should, however, be also large enough within the area covered in terms that are cost effective with the number of readers needed. (The larger the area, the more readers are required.)

In practical terms, the read range of the active RFID varies from 10 feet to a thousand feet flexibility within the coverage area. RFID tags can be designed and programmed to track patients outdoors of the building or roaming in the campus area.

Special alerts can be programmed depending on the needs of the facility, the area or the patient.

Components

The RFID has 3 components to its technology – the RFID reader, or the interrogator unit (it has an antenna and transceiver), the RFID tag and the transponder attached to the item being tracked. There is also middleware software that communicates with existing systems.

When the reader sends a signal using a specific predetermined frequency, the tag comes to life and sends back information to the receiver. In practice, both devices are communicating with each other.

Passive and active tags

The passive RFID does not have a power source. The power comes from the reader. The active magnetic coil inside is activated when the reader calls to the tag, energizes the coil which in turn activates the circuits that hold the pre-programmed information in its memory.

There are several factors that influence the decision to use a specific tag type. These would include environmental conditions, application purpose, and the degree of accuracy needed in the process of locating a person (or an item).

Antennas

Passive RFIDs give an organization to power to recognize and record when a RFID tag or transponder is in the proximity of an RFID reader (as noted by its antenna). Antennas are usually installed if the organization wants to record the presence of an RFID tag.

These antennas can be installed anywhere in the facility. (No two organizations have the same requirement.) Typically, RFID antennas are installed at “choke points” in the facility like doorways.

RFID patient tracking is one of these invaluable services in a hospital.

Patient Tracking Devices - For Regular and Emergency Use

In a world where people and situations become more and more complex, it is fortunate that technology and science had kept up in managing them, especially in health care facilities like hospitals, big clinics, and medical centers. One big technological step is the development of patient tracking devices systems in these places.

With the ongoing progress in modern life come new and challenging problems. In big medical complexes where the number of patients is rising, managing their movements and whereabouts has been a huge difficulty if not for the developments of systems that kept them within the facility grounds. 

RFID tags

In the healthcare industry, the development of RFID technology helped healthcare administrators in the tracking of patients that may have wandered and lost their way from their beds and rooms. This is actually an identification system based on RFID, or radio frequency identification.  

Basically, it is an electronic RFID tag embedded in wristbands or special badges with tamper-proof mechanism to prevent users from removing them from their persons, or it can signal an alert if there is an attempt to remove it from the wearer.

RFID readers

RFID readers are strategically placed all over the facility for the patient to be located at once within a measurable distance. This distance is dictated by the system integrator to be small enough for the patient to be found easily and wide enough for proper cost effectiveness.

On average, the read range for active RFID is within ten feet to a thousand feet with enough flexibility in setting up the coverage area. The tags can also be programmed to track the patients outside from their designated places. Alerts can be programmed, too, if these are needed for the facility, the area or the patient.

Added uses

Aside from the original main goal of preventing patients from wandering out of the place without a trace, there are now added uses carried by RFID tracking. For new patients, especially emergency victims (accidents, heart attacks, others that need immediate doctor’s attention, others), the tags are also used to carry written information about their current health.

A burn victim, for instance, might have a tag with his personal condition, plus other items in his health history. For instance, immediate operation might pose great risks to his present hear conditions, say.  (The writing is done inside the ambulance). The monitoring system will then know the conditions and sends the right doctor to the emergency room.

Benefits

These tracking service used on patients (today, hospital staff and personnel are also wearing them) is continuously tracking each patient’s location, and readable by anyone have a use for the system. 

Aside from the main users (patients), RFID tags are now being worn by hospital personnel and others that will also restrict them the access to places where drugs are kept, pediatrics area and other critical areas like high-threat places in times of emergencies.

The patient tracking devices now carry several other tasks that cut down much of the work of hospital personnel, thus beneficial not just in terms of work but also reduce unnecessary costs.

Business Intelligence Systems - Positive Decision-making

Business intelligence systems Australia (also popularly known in business circles as BI) are used in improving the decision-making of an organization. This it does by combining the tools for gathering, storing, accessing and analyzing business data. 

Traditionally, the main working focus of BI had been on querying, reporting, and analytics. The system had evolved in the intervening years to become comprehensive, enterprise-wide platforms. Newer trends, like self-service BI, had helped foster interest in the technology.

In short, BI is a combination of the tools and systems involved in the strategic planning by an enterprise that helps in its analysis.

Solutions

Solutions provided by BI are the sources where a company’s disparate data sources allow users to execute queries without the technical staff. These queries and reporting have evolved into enterprise-wide platforms.

The application analyzes patterns in sales, trends, pricing, and customer behavior to help the business decision-making process. The use of data warehouses, e-commerce tools, CTM packages and others had created a need to easily view and use the information stored in the system.

The evolution of this software genre includes new trends, including self-service techniques. The common BI functions include analyzing sales trends, tracking customer habits, managing finances, evaluating the effectiveness of sales and marketing campaigns, predicting market demand, analyzing vendor relationships, and assessing staffing needs and performance within the organization.

Uses

There are now non-traditional market segments that are also driving the need for enterprise-wide, cross-application by BI. In government agencies, business intelligence tracks tax revenues and monitors the delivery of public services. (NASA uses the company’s solutions to oversee the relationships with its 3rd party contractors.)

Prospective BI users today show a preference for suites that address all BI functions across an organization. The efforts that leading software companies are making to expand their BI lines suggest that they are seeing strong demand for the technology. The outcome is taking shape as the market is dominated by companies with complete BI suites.

Trends

One of the latest trends in the technology is the so-called “self-service BI”. Many aver that this is one way of making BI more pervasive, delivering insights into every decision that derives the business. It empowers users with actionable insights while removing mundane developments.

Another trend is the market consolidation when vendors acquire best-of-breed smaller vendors.
This is the big fish-little fish where companies gobble up smaller ones while they themselves are gobbled up by larger companies.

Dashboards

The dashboard, which had been in and out of favor many times before for the past 15 years is trending a comeback. These are the snapshots of data, complete with colorful graphs, charts and gauges have already changed since the days they were simply intended for executive use only and with static information.

Now, they are created fast with no programming necessary. The data updates are in real time delivered to workers in the enterprise who drill down and analyze metrics as needed. The dashboards today are also full of drag-and-drop personalization features that assure pertinence to anyone’s role.

Today, business intelligence systems Australia also include some self-explanatory tools as business activity monitoring, mobile access, and information portals. 

Business Intelligence Solutions - Using the New Mix

In today’s hands-on culture, companies have already found that quick access to information is one of the most vital components to get ahead of competition. This is where business intelligence solutions Queensland helped bring insights for organizations to make quick decisions, reduce costs, and discover new and other success opportunities.

The solutions that business intelligence (commonly known as BI) already have the capacity to now satisfy the reporting and analysis needs of the whole organization, from front liners to executives and to analysts.

BI

Business intelligence is one wide category of computer solutions for company’s varied use. Basically, these are all used to gain insight into the company’s critical operations via its reporting applications and analysis tools.

These may include such components as tabular reports, charts, spreadsheets, and dashboards. Traditionally, they are delivered onto the host’s terminals and though paper reports.

These days, the modern deployment of BI systems is over the web, via Internet, or intranet connections. Some new ones have now developed interactive BI apps optimized for mobile devices (tablets, smart phones, and the email).

Well-developed BI applications brings to anyone in the company the ability to exercise better decisions through quick understanding of the many “information assets” in the organization. Most important, they understood how all these will interact with each other.

The assets

The various assets include customer databases, personnel data, supply chain information, manufacturing and product data, sales and marketing activities, and all other information critical to the company’s operations.

A healthy BI application would include integration and data cleansing functions, and can allow the user to integrate the many disparate data sources and gather them into one coherent framework. This allows real reporting and detailed analysis for anyone in the enterprise – the customers, the partners, the executives and managers, and the employees.

Some problems

With regards to the systems and the solutions, the biggest problem to date is user resistance. Some others have something to do with poor data quality and raking across irrelevant data that are huge.
As has always been, accurate insights from the business intelligence solutions Queensland can be had through standard data.

As it is, companies have been sourcing their data from data stores and data warehouses in good conditions. This they do before they can extract and act on insights. Otherwise, the whole operations will be based on flawed information.

The system and the tools
 
The second difficulty is the BI tools. They may be scalable and user-friendly, but they are still doing reporting instead of process management. (Fortunately, this is beginning to change.)

Thirdly, most companies still don’t understand their own business processes well enough. This is necessary to change them and they need to be careful on the processes they select. If the process won’t have a direct impact on revenues (and on the business itself), the entire BI efforts might break up.

Today, companies have to understand the many facets of their particular business process. This would include how information and data flow across the processes, how data is passed across users, and how people will use it. Business intelligence solutions Queensland have to be used wisely.