Rockford Memorial to save big with Wi-Fi tracking

Hospital lassos assets with Wi-Fi net

Industry analysis by expert Joanie Wexler, plus links to the day's wireless news headlines

Have you ever figured out what it costs over time just to look for items you have misplaced? Gary Bayston at Rockford Memorial Hospital has.

The hospital’s manager of biomedical engineering calculates that, conservatively, the 396-bed facility in Rockford, Ill., loses $4,000 per day, or nearly $1.5 million per year, in productivity alone just trying to find wayward mobile medical equipment. This is the value Bayston places on 7,760 minutes each month that nurses, support staff and other hospital personnel spend tracking down beds, ventilators, wheelchairs, intravenous pumps and other equipment.

So Rockford’s biomedical engineering and networking departments have teamed on an asset-tracking project that combines the hospital’s existing Cisco Wi-Fi network, PanGo Networks’ location-tracking application and Four Rivers’ asset management system.

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Have you ever figured out what it costs over time just to look for items you have misplaced? Gary Bayston at Rockford Memorial Hospital has.

The hospital’s manager of biomedical engineering calculates that, conservatively, the 396-bed facility in Rockford, Ill., loses $4,000 per day, or nearly $1.5 million per year, in productivity alone just trying to find wayward mobile medical equipment. This is the value Bayston places on 7,760 minutes each month that nurses, support staff and other hospital personnel spend tracking down beds, ventilators, wheelchairs, intravenous pumps and other equipment.

So Rockford’s biomedical engineering and networking departments have teamed on an asset-tracking project that combines the hospital’s existing Cisco Wi-Fi network, PanGo Networks’ location-tracking application and Four Rivers’ asset management system.

The short-term goals are to have equipment at the ready to treat patients efficiently, find equipment when it’s due for servicing, avoid replacing lost items and to lower equipment-rental costs, says Bayston.

Eventually, the system might be applied to tracking Alzheimer’s patients and infants.

So far, the biomed group has affixed PanGo Wi-Fi tags to 20 ventilators across three departments and aims to tag 3,000 to 4,000 pieces of mobile equipment within the next two years or so. A special “location site survey” must be conducted apart from the Wi-Fi transmission site survey for the application to work, and Bayston says he intends to survey the rest of the hospital Nov. 1.

The PanGo Locator tags are active tags, in that they power themselves (battery life equals one to two years) and send an update to the PanGo database via the Wi-Fi network every time a tagged item moves. An update is also sent to the Four Rivers work order-tracking database (PanGo and Four Rivers partnered to write interfaces between the two apps).

Biomed uses the Four Rivers application for a full history of all asset information, now including location; nurses and others use the PanGo application to see, right on a monitor, exactly where assets are, as they are represented by realistic icons. As a ventilator moves, for example, its associated icon correspondingly traverses the screen, Bayston says.

There were some challenges with the installation: Rockford’s manager of networking and data security Joe Granneman will discuss those next time.

Read more about wireless & mobile in Network World's Wireless & Mobile section.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.