Saving lives with IoT

WIREPAS PARTNER CASE

RFiD Discovery FOR THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICES (NHS)

Our partner, RFiD Discovery, is on a mission to accelerate operations. Their products offer organizations the ability to reduce costs and lower risk by servicing complete visibility of assets.

A nurse can spend more than two hours just looking for the right equipment in a typical working week. It may take a few minutes to find a tool one is looking for. Or as much as half a day. That’s a lot of time lost if you’re running a hospital employing thousands of medical staff. We all know time is money. But in health care, time is also a matter of life or death. This was the challenge for three London hospitals in the spring of 2020. As Covid-19 had forced a national shut down, the hospitals were in desperate need of a tracking solution to ease the burdens imposed by the pandemic. Luckily, we could help RFiD Discovery offer a solution. It’s both quick and effective enough without hurting the hospitals’ budgets. Saving money instead. When there’s no need to have a large tool pool just because it’s not easy to find something, there’s less need for an excessive amount of extra equipment. As a result, the NHS reduced the amount of surplus equipment from 30% to as little as 5%. That’s a good use of time and money.

CHALLENGE

Tracking medical assets in a pandemic crisis

As the Covid-19 pandemic flooded Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) with patients, three of its hospitals in the London area realized they had an asset-tracking problem. Already under hard pressure, staff was spending too much time looking for essential medical equipment like ventilators, infusion pumps or even beds. Not to mention things getting lost creating high costs and stress in an already difficult situation. Deploying wired positioning infrastructure across large spaces like hospitals is both costly and time consuming. But the NHS badly needed an asset tracking system. It had to be massive in coverage and easy to deploy without disturbing recovering patients or working personnel. And, since this was during the shutdown in the spring of 2020, the system had to be both launched and handled 100% off-site.

SOLUTION

Massive deployment in record time

In came our friends at RFiD Discovery, a company that provides turnkey solutions for geolocation helping end users to improve their mobile assets management. As a partner in our eco-system, they quickly realized that the specific challenges of the project and its strict timeline could all be met using Wirepas technology. And the timeline was tight, to say the least. RFiD Discovery managed to deliver a complete asset-tracking system within less than a month from receiving the Purchase Order. Without being able to have any personnel on-site!

After just two weeks, a local technician was trained in documentation and end user support. The hardware was delivered, and the technician needed only four days to stick 350 anchors to their fixed points in the hospitals. One week later, the RFiD Discovery platforms were set up locally and only a week after that more than three thousand tags were delivered, fixed to “their” medical equipment, and deployed. The system now covers 90 000 sq. m. spread across three hospitals and sixteen floors. It delivers information from the Wirepas on-site networks including more than 3 000 tags to identify a wide range of essential medical equipment. Installation was very easy, with the entire deployment taking no more than four to five days. Everything was done and executed by the hospital’s own personnel without the need of extensive training, or any shutting down of wards or disturbing patients or the daily routines of the hospitals.

RESULTS

Asset tracking as a Covid-19 response

The results from installing Wirepas connectivity in these three London hospitals were both tangible and immediate. During a period of intense workloads, it vastly improved working conditions and saved time for the health care staff, nurses and doctors. The system has reduced the stress of looking for medical devices, giving more time to care for patients and to find assets being exchanged between departments hosting Covid patients. The entire project was delivered in less than two months from the initial lead qualification, but the ultimate gains in better treatment or even lives saved are impossible to measure.