Wi-Fi helps PA hospital get RFID in place quickly

York (PA) Hospital, a 580-bed teaching facility that's part of the WellSpan Health organization, has implemented RFID asset tracking in its emergency, biomedical engineering and transportation departments. The hospital has tagged many of its most common items that are regularly moved throughout the building, including gurneys, infusion pumps, feeding pumps, portable physiological monitors and circulatory assistance pumps. Because the RFID system runs on an existing Wi-Fi network, York also can locate computers-on-wheels and portable IP phones without extra tags.

The RFID vendor, Redwood City, CA-based AeroScout, says that York Hospital had been searching for a suitable real-time location system for five years before choosing AeroScout's MobileView software and Wi-Fi tagging a year ago, in large part because it relies on proven technology that the hospital already had. "One clear advantage of the AeroScout solution is that it leverages standard Wi-Fi, which means it was easy and cost effective to deploy and manage, allowed us to get up and running quickly and allowed us to stay within our budget," Chad Noll, WellSpan's manager of biomedical engineering, said in a statement released by AeroScout.

For more on the York Hospital RFID deployment:
- read this AeroScout press release

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