The Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center, a health care institution affiliated with the University of South Carolina Medical School and several other colleges in the South Carolina region, has announced the deployment of RFID solutions in its operating room facilities.
The solutions, used for tracking high value equipment and supplies, integrate Mercury5 UHF RFID readers provided by ThingMagic with hardware provided by the Industrial Portals division of Jamison Door to create RFID Loss Prevention Portals. The portals are installed at OR exits leading to laundry facilities and decontamination areas. Small surgical instruments, vulnerable to loss among bulky linens or surgical scrubs, are tagged with passive RFID tags which cause an alarm to sound if they pass through the portals.
The hospital is also using ThingMagic technology to support the preparation of OR case carts. In a system which deploys ThingMagic’s Astra Integrated UHF readers, hospital personnel can monitor each stage of equipment flow through contaminated cart storage, decontamination and sterilization, perioperative staging and the case staging area.
ThingMagic readers have also been deployed throughout the hospital to track mobile equipment such as infusion pumps, an increasingly common RFID application in hospitals around the country.
All of the hospital’s RFID-enabled solutions are integrated with the SynTrack for Health Care software system, a product of Integrated Business Systems and Services, Inc. (IBSS). The IBSS system enables Greenville staff to locate and map any type of RFID-tagged asset with handheld computers and application software. ![[end]](/resources/bullet/rfidnews-4.gif)
