RadarFind Corporation, a healthcare technology company, has announced that it has unveiled the Sentry AV for the Real Time Location System alarm.

 

RTLS is used for locating and tracking medical equipment and patients and with Sentry AV it now has active RFID alarm capabilities. The Sentry AV can be easily fixed to a wall and it easily integrates into RadarFind’s sophisticated wireless sensor network to identify events that will trigger an audio or visual alarm, or both at once depending on hospital user preference.

 

According to the company, its RTLS uses simple and inexpensive nodes (badges/tags) attached to or embedded in objects and devices (readers) that receive the wireless signals from these tags to determine their locations.

 

RadarFind has stated that Mary Washington Hospital of Fredericksburg, Va., has requested the sensor-driven Sentry AV as a means of alerting staff when telemetry units were headed towards laundry or exit areas. The hospital had previously provided valuable input when they developed the industry’s first RTLS tag (News - Alert) designed for modular cardiac telemetry devices.

 

Cardiac telemetry devices monitor a patient’s heart rate and transmit that information, usually to a nurse’s station. These expensive devices due to their small size are often misplaced or accidently rolled up in bed linens, mistakenly laundered and destroyed, costing hospitals thousands of dollars.

 

Andy Holden, director of biomedical services for Mary Washington Hospital has said that RadarFind’s hospital-centric approach to asset tracking was a key factor in their decision to use their system. RadarFind’s alarm capability through Sentry AV will increase the system’s effectiveness to reduce waste, maintain costs and improve the efficiency of hospital processes.

 

RadarFind has claimed that patient safety will be ensured in hospitals by using this new sensor alarm functions in the future. Sentry AV can be used to alert hospital staff when patients enter or exit designated areas and keep the issue of patient elopement under check. The addition of a sensor alarm will further enhance the RTLS’s ability to help hospitals manage resource demands.

 

RadarFind’s integration with various patient flow solutions from parent company TeleTracking Technologies is designed to streamline hospital operational efficiency.