Feb 7 2013
Awarepoint Corporation, the largest real-time location system (RTLS) corporation dedicated exclusively to healthcare, announces the launch of its new Bed and Bay Sensor that enables precise tracking of mobile equipment and patient and caregiver interactions in locations with tight-bed spacing, such as the emergency department (ED) and pre- and post-anesthesia care.
Awarepoint is currently accepting orders for the device, which will become generally available on March 31st, 2013. Awarepoint will demonstrate the new sensor's ease-of-use and functionality at the HIMSS®13 Annual Conference and Exhibition Booth #6918 in New Orleans, March 3-7, 2013.
Following highly successful beta testing, implementation of Bed and Bay Sensors is currently underway at Delaware-based Christiana Care Health System, which oversees emergency departments at Christiana Hospital, Wilmington Hospital, and the soon-to-open freestanding Middletown Emergency Department.
"Working in one of the busiest emergency departments on the East Coast, I am very pleased with what the Bed and Bay Sensor offers us," stated Linda Laskowski Jones, RN, MS, Vice President of Emergency & Trauma Services at Christiana Care Health System. "The Bed and Bay Sensors are extremely accurate and allow us to capture interactions that are traditionally difficult to distinguish, such as those in triage areas that are separated only by curtains. Having access to this information enables us to make more meaningful and informed decisions about where and how we can make improvements."
"We really appreciate our relationship with Christiana Care," said Jay Deady, President and CEO of Awarepoint. "Christiana Care has been a client of Awarepoint's since 2003, and is a collaborative partner in optimizing our solution to drive operational and clinical improvements. I cannot thank them enough for their efforts in testing the Bed and Bay Sensor, and bringing this great product to market."
According to Matt Perkins, CTO of Awarepoint, "We're very excited about this latest addition to our RTLS platform. The Bed and Bay Sensor represents excellence and innovation in research and development, and will help our clients detect discrete interactions between caregivers, patients and equipment -- such precision is important in interpreting activities and anticipating roadblocks in the patient's care plan, while supporting proactive communication to drive action. Clinical leaders are looking for solutions that help reduce variability, drive Lean processes, automate decisions and simplify workflow to streamline care delivery, and we're proud to be a part of that solution."
The Bed and Bay Sensor uses Awarepoint's ZigBee®-based infrastructure to route data from RTLS tags on patients, personnel and assets to the aware360°Platform. The sensor is part of a family of products that provides the greatest level of accuracy for patient and caregiver interactions, creating an interaction region around a bed or bay. The ZigBee®-based 802.15.4 standard delivers the fastest, least disruptive RTLS in the industry -- a 100% wireless, self-healing mesh network that assures consistent location accuracy. The physical layer radio technology and protocols are designed for very low power consumption at data rates that do not interfere with or burden WiFi signals.
The ability of the Bed and Bay Sensor to precisely and accurately track assets, patients and clinicians in small spaces is critical because it enables facilities to:
- Capture hard data for calculating critical care time by physicians for billing
- Document actual respiratory therapy treatment times for charge capture
- Leverage real-time, location based data to support clinical quality measures and value-based purchasing metrics in ED and OR environments
- Record caregiver time at the bedside for acuity calculation and productivity
- Drive workflow based on clinician/patient interactions and care plans to expedite patient flow
- Detect equipment in the patient's care area
- Verify clinician interactions with patients for quality initiatives
Awarepoint's aware360°Suite intelligently automates and streamlines asset management, ED and OR care, capacity management, patient flow, caregiver coordination, quality and regulatory compliance, and patient and staff satisfaction. The suite spans the entire hospital enterprise, leveraging tag location and movement to track, report on, and proactively improve asset, staff, and patient workflows.