Customer

Hospital in HongKong

Challenge

The outbreak of devastating & highly contagious diseases, such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the threat of Avian Flu have highlighted the urgent need for the healthcare industry to improve the capability and efficiency of contact tracking. During such contagious disease outbreaks, healthcare authorities and hospitals today track these patients manually. This manual procedure is not only laborious and time consuming for the healthcare staff, but it is also subject to error and possibly incomplete records. Clearly there is a need to automate and improve the contact tracking process to ensure all possible sources of contamination are documented as well as to off load the recording burden of the healthcare staff.

While traditional wireless location tracking system can offer real time location information of individual assets, they don't efficiently allow for detailed information regarding asset to asset relationships.  Cost of installation, difficulty of integration with legacy IT infrastructure and concerns for interference with other wireless systems has impeded adoption of wireless solutions in the hospital.  The ability to document who and when an infectious patient has made contact with others provides an opportunity to look for new solutions.

Solution

To address this need, Helicomm offers a new Contact Tracking System (CTS) for healthcare facilities. This system, based on Helicomm's Location Tracking System, provides the additional capability of reporting contacts an infectious patient has made.  The mobile tags of the Helicomm tracking system, not only report into reader/access points, but also provide peer to peer communications with other tags in the system.  Any patient, staff member or visitor that is wearing a Helicomm mobile tag, will be logged into the contact history of the infected patient wearing a similar tag.

Why Helicomm