Hastings hospital to track patients electronically

Patients admitted to the emergency department of Hawke's Bay hospital in Hastings will be tagged with RFID chips so their movements can be automatically monitored by wireless scanners.

The hospital will be the first in New Zealand to test the futuristic technology. Hawke's Bay District Health Board hopes information collected by the electronic tags will identify bottlenecks in the hospital system and help it better manage beds and roster staff.

Where RFID technology has been used overseas, patients are usually tagged using wrist bands.

The long-awaited RFID trial has been organised by the HealthIT Cluster, an organisation whose members include about 40 health IT firms.

The lead technology partner is Christchurch software company Emendo, which sells a capacity planning application called CapPlan. IBM New Zealand. Patient management software giant IBA Health will also contribute to the trial.

Emendo co-founder Dave Tinkler hopes the system will then be adopted by other hospitals in New Zealand and overseas.

HealthIT Cluster chief executive Andrea Pettet says the trial aims to use RFID tagging to ease overcrowding in emergency departments, using the principles of "lean thinking".

"Lean thinking is a philosophy that has been used widely in manufacturing industries, but is also very applicable in healthcare.

"It is essentially about simplifying processes, identifying which parts of a process add value to patient care, enabling care to flow more effectively and eliminating waste."

Hawke's Bay DHB chief information officer Jo-Ann Jacobson believes the principles of lean thinking and the innovative use of IT will have substantial benefit for the emergency department.

The RFID monitoring system will be linked to Hawke's Bay hospital's PAS patient management system, so capacity planning and bed management systems are automatically updated when patients are admitted and discharged.

The movement patients or manual scans could trigger messages to be automatically sent to clinical staff equipped with Vocera phones.

These are voice-activated mobile phones sold in New Zealand by IBM that are designed for hands- free operation and which can send messages over a hospital's local area network, without incurring toll call charges.

- © Fairfax NZ News