Regulatory organizations, such as The Joint Commission (formerly JCAHO), set stringent standards for daily or more frequent temperature monitoring in hospitals. Maintaining these standards for nursing, laboratory and pharmacy staff has traditionally been a manual process that is labor and time intensive and prone to errors, or has required expensive, single-purpose products.
The AeroScout solution, which is FDA-registered, utilizes the company's market leading Wi-Fi RFID tags with integrated temperature sensors, and a software module for logging and acting upon temperature data. Because the same tags and infrastructure can also be used for other visibility applications such as medical asset tracking and patient workflow improvement, customers can take advantage of a scalable and cost-effective system that can perform multiple applications as their needs expand.
The tags are simply placed inside refrigerators, freezers and deep freezers that contain expensive and difficult to replace items such as vaccines, pharmaceuticals, tissues, blood bags, organs and patient test results. The tags wirelessly and automatically send temperature readings over a standard Wi-Fi network to AeroScout's MobileView software. If the temperature of the cooling unit exceeds or goes below a set threshold, an alert is triggered and sent to hospital staff. Temperature-triggered alerts can be sent to hospital staff and all information including temperature logs, alerts and corrective actions are stored in AeroScout MobileView. Users can generate reports and analyze temperature trends and deviations.
Several hospitals have already begun using AeroScout's wireless Temperature Monitoring Solution, including Jan Yperman Hospital in Belgium.
"Automatically monitoring and reporting on asset temperatures will free our nurses and clinical staff up to do what they do best: provide our patients with the highest quality care possible," said Christophe Mouton, director of administration, finance, ICT and technical service, Jan Yperman Hospital. "The ability to use our existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to monitor temperature is a major advantage offered by AeroScout, and one that keeps costs low while integrating easily into our clinical environment."
AeroScout's Healthcare Visibility Suite offers a comprehensive set of wireless solutions to increase visibility of assets and patients within healthcare facilities. In addition to wireless Temperature Monitoring, AeroScout's Wi-Fi Healthcare Visibility Suite includes Asset Management, Equipment Maintenance, Workflow & Resource Management and Patient & Staff Safety solutions. These solutions all utilize the same Wi-Fi infrastructure, MobileView software and tags, making it easy for hospitals to scale and gain increasing benefits. AeroScout is also exclusively endorsed by the American Hospital Association (AHA) for Wi-Fi-Based RFID solutions.
For more information on AeroScout's wireless Temperature Monitoring solution and Wi-Fi healthcare visibility suite, see www.aeroscout.com.
