Albert Einstein uses real-time tracking system to save lives, cash
If the guy who said “what gets measured gets managed” stepped foot into Albert Einstein Medical Center he would have been a happy man.
The Logan-based hospital has been using a Real-Time Location System (RTLS) that monitors and measures the location of doctors, medical devices and patients since last September, according to RIFD Journal, but the North Broad Street fixture has just released their first round of related metrics.
What Twitter is to your friends’ eating habits, the RTLS is to medicine.
Each patient who comes through the hospital is given one of the 350 special ID cards that gets synced with the patient’s medical file. The devices act as a GPS of sorts, relaying the location of the wearer to receivers throughout the hospital which transmit the data over a local area network to a computer running special software. Hospital employees can pull up the building’s floor plan and see in real-time where patients and co-workers are and how long they have been there.
Doctors no longer have to go searching for equipment (and each other), while the time patients spend waiting around to be treated is being cut down.
Yeah, I think hospitals should stop pretending it’s 1974 and drop the paper, too.
