Skyview High School Gives Ekahau RTLS an A+ after lockdown drill

Ekahau school safety badge pictured above.

 

KTVB of Idaho reports that Ekahau Real-Time Location System (RTLS) scored an A+ in the lockdown drill at Skyview High School yesterday afternoon. Skyview was very pleased with speed of the system so emergencies are attended in under a minute. “From the time I pulled it [panic switch], to the time the announcement went off, it was probably 15 seconds. And then less than a minute before Officer Ford walked in, so it was very fast,” said senior Toby Anderson, the student who activated the lockdown alarm. Police Chief Craig Kingsbury said, “There’s no waiting. There’s no explaining. You’re not going to lose precious seconds trying to justify why you need help. Help’s just going to come.” Chief Kingsbury is sharing the test results from Skyview High School to show police departments across Idaho how well Ekahau RTLS works for school safety. Chief Kingsbury hopes to get Ekahau RTLS system into every Idaho school.

When the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) badge’s panic switch or ripcord is pulled by a staff member, this triggers the school to go into instant lockdown. Also, every badge holder receives an alert notifying them of the lockdown, so classrooms can be secured quickly and effectively. The school’s resource officer’s badge alerts him of the location of the emergency (and police dispatch also receives this information instantly) so he can respond in less than a minute.

“One of the biggest positives of the [RFID] badges is the shortened response time in a serious situation”, Will Barber, Skyview’s Lead Building Administrator, said. “Previously, teachers had to leave the classroom or call the school’s office to get help in an emergency.”

One teacher reports that she already used the system for a real emergency. “I actually used it [Ekahau RTLS] a week ago for a health emergency that happened in my class, and they came really quick for that too. So this is actually the second time I was able to use it, and it was really fascinating,” said English teacher Terri Bentley. Also, Bentley commented that she was attacked leaving school ground a few years ago and system like this would have been very valuable to have then.

The Idaho Press Tribune reports that before the installation of the Ekahau RTLS system, the school’s secretary was the designated person who could issue a school lockdown using the intercom system. But Police Chief Kingsbury said this system was problematic because it took much longer to issue the lockdown and even more time lost to figure out where to send the school’s resource officer. “If an active shooter were to take that person out, there’s no other person to call a lockdown,” Kingsbury said. “But now, any staff can call a lockdown. This makes it [emergency response protocol] less dangerous.”

The Idaho Statesman reported over the weekend that Skyview High School in Nampa, Idaho is the very first to test a new ID badge system that can alert everyone of a school emergency and send the location of the person in distress. The notification badge technology is called RTLS and uses the school’s Wi-Fi network to send help messages directly to police and all other staff members carrying the RFID badges with the wearer’s exact location. This system is different than most common notification systems because the location of the wearer is available in real-time. The police or other staff members can view floor maps of the school and see exactly where all staff members wearing the RFID badges are located. RTLS is currently used in several verticals including mental health for staff duress.

For more information on how Ekahau RTLS works for school safety, check out our school safety solution case study from a deployment in German school system.

Skyview High School Installs Ekahau RFID-over-Wi-Fi™ Badges Locate Students During Emergencies and Keep the School Safe

Schools all over the U.S. are looking for innovative ways to ensure school safety. Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) are one component of a school safety everyone can agree on—RTLS gives police, administrators and teachers that visibility.

One school in Nampa, Idaho is testing a RTLS system using the school’s Wi-Fi network to keep their student’s safer. Skyview High School’s School Resource Officer Brad Ford and School Counselor Mandy Petty were challenged to think outside of the box to make the high school safer. Ford says that Ekahau’s solution peaked his interest because, “we wanted to do something where it was not evasive into the school, where we didn’t want to create a prison environment for the student.” Knowing the exact location of an individual during an emergency can shorten response times and prevent death and injuries.

Ekahau active RFID badges show the actual location of 75 staff members who volunteered to participate in the Ekahau pilot project. Ekahau Vision™ software displays the exact location of staff members on school floor plan maps via web browser. With the Ekahau RTLS badge, a Skyview HS staff member can move the school into lockdown in 4 seconds with a pull of a panic switch on the badge. All staff and area police receive the lockdown message on their Wi-Fi badge so that school safety protocols can be enacted immediately. If a lesser emergency arises, the staff member can press different buttons on the badge to communicate for assistance from medical to police.

Petty comments that, “It’s [Ekahau RTLS] a component that I think was missing from schools, just that immediate communication.” Ford said that Ekahau’s badge system may change the police and schools approach an active shooter situation. Adding location awareness to a school’s safety plan was such a compelling idea, that an anonymous donor gave the estimated $30,000 to Skyview because the school convinced the donor that Ekahau RTLS was their ideal solution.

To end, Petty related that, “The money is out there, it’s just a matter of what our kids’ lives are worth. Look at what we spend to protect our banks, our cars, our homes. When do we start protecting our kids and what is the dollar value to that?”

For more information, check out the news coverage and videos from the following sources:

KTVB – Technology helping to improve safety at Nampa school

KBOI 2 – Skyview High puts new security system to the test

ABC 6 – Local high school leads the way in school safety technology

Idaho Statesman – ID badge alerts tested at Skyview High School to stem school violence

Idaho Press-Tribune – Skyview High School pioneers emergency alert badges

For more information on school grants from the Ekahau blog, please see our prior post entitled, “Real-Time Location with Alerting Can Help Make Schools Safer” or our blog post following federal funding for school safety here.

Did you see Ekahau RTLS (RFID-over Wi-Fi™) in Times Square?

RTLS sighting in New York City — Ekahau RTLS made its first appearance in Times Square with an ad on one of the large jumbotrons. The ad features Ekahau RTLS Vision™ software highlighting the company’s business intelligence platform and capabilities.

Check out the picture below to see Ekahau’s ad in New York City.  

43% of Hospital Executives Say Largest Capital Investments Will be in IT

Becker’s Hospital Review reports that according to the Spring 2013 edition of the Economic Outlook survey, 43% of hospital executives stated that their largest capital investment over the next year will be for healthcare IT and telecommunications. Just two years ago, the same survey found that only 21% of hospital executives said that HIT would be the largest capital expenditure. The Economic Outlook survey polled 530 hospital C-suite executives, materials and practice area managers. These survey results further confirm that hospital systems are interested in using HIT to increase efficiency and overall quality of care.

The Premier healthcare alliance’s Economic Outlook further substantiates that demand for technologies including RTLS (Real-Time location system) and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) will exponentially increase in the next few years. Another recent study found that the RTLS market is estimated to reach $4 billion dollars by 2022.

Now that hospitals have undergone EHR implementations, they are ready to consider and fund RTLS RFID-over Wi-Fi™ projects that deliver hospital-wide tracking with business intelligence helping their scheduling, patient care, supply chain process and costs and much more. Location-based business intelligence software give hospitals an analytical tool to improve workflows, create better staff safety, optimize and reduce equipment rentals and increase patient satisfaction increasing staffing. RTLS using business intelligence software can reduce OPEX and CAPEX while increasing revenues and productivity.

OSCUMC and SAMC are already experiencing and attempting to quantify the RTLS with RFID over Wi-Fi™ ROI. Check out Ekahau’s case study on OSCUMC for more on the ROI of business intelligence through RTLS using Ekahau Vision™.

See the screenshot below of the Ekahau Vision™ easy to use business intelligence interface.

Exciting Features added to Ekahau Vision

We have recently added to our RTLS solution, especially in the area which is our specialty as the only RTLS provider with 2-way messaging via our Wi-Fi badge tags: safety and security.

Working with customers, we wanted to enhance customer experience for those using our safety alert solution. We came up with two key enhancements to our Ekahau Vision^TM application. One feature is centered around the messaging on the staff tags and the other feature is centered on events analysis, for example, alarms triggered with a pull on our patent-pending badge safety switch.

Read more on the new Ekahau Vision^TM Messaging Center and Event Forensics Replay features.

Ekahau Vision™ Messaging Center

Ekahau’s badge tag for staff, guests, patients, teachers and students is unique in the RTLS world. It’s the only active RFID over Wi-Fi™ badge to offer text on a badge LED, so 2-way messaging is enabled on the tag.  Our latest addition to Ekahau Vision^TM is a completely new feature called Messaging. See the screenshot below:

The process for sending a message is simple. Using Ekahau Vision™ software from Ekahau, find the people (badge-holders) you want to message from a drop down list, write your unique text message in the neat display that mimics the appearance of a badge tag and click Send. That’s it. In three short steps, you are done. Mass communications also become easier, and if you spot an emergency showing red on the map, you can send people away from the area via text notification, so they don’t run towards the danger zone.

The mobile phone slogan “Connecting people”, is finally married with location visibility, capturing the notion that “you can’t solve what you can’t see. Ekahau goes further by integrating 2-way communications and location. Not only you can send a message, you can make sure that your message will reach the right people in the right place (at the right time, when they need it). Imagine all the possibilities of adding messaging into your RTLS solution.

How does messaging help with security?

Now you can search for people located in specific areas and alert them with a simple click and your alert message will spring into their tag’s display. If preferred, you can customize alert messages with a particular sound, like a siren, so that the recipients know, without even looking at their display, that the message represents a security alert. This is a powerful means of conveying security alerts and messages.

Emergency Event Forensics Replay

A staff tag alarm sounded at 9:26 AM; was everyone in the right place and did everybody react correctly according to emergency procedures? It is difficult to tell after an emergency if everyone acted according to plan without a tool that allows an analysis of the event. Ekahau listened to our customers and we built a tool to help answering those questions called Events Forensics Replay^TM into our software.

Ekahau Vision^TM Forensics Replay allows a complete post emergency analysis from the time the event started to the time it stopped. Everyone who’s been alerted by a message to their staff tag will be seen in the visional replay for the entire event. See the screenshot below of Ekahau Vision™ Forensic Reply™.

The ability to travel through time and view a past event to see how everyone reacted is something we, at Ekahau, are very excited to offer our customers. We know this capability can allow security to analyze their facility’s performance and identify every bottleneck in the system. By analyzing the bottlenecks security procedures and policies, security and emergency planning can be improved to provide a safer environment.

Stay tuned; we have more exciting news very soon on new features and offering to our RTLS solution set.

Imagine a Hospital without Waiting Rooms—JISF is Practically Doing It Today

“Imagine a hospital without waiting rooms”—RTLS has your attention now. This week, GE Healthcare released a new Matrix-themed ad “Agent of Good” showcasing the power of real-time location visibility in hospitals. Real-time location connects caregivers, patients and devices according to GE Healthcare—it “helps hospitals treat people better”.

If your hospitals already standardized on Wi-Fi – what most hospitals use by default for device connectivity then you’re ready for tag-less location tracking when it becomes reality.  RTLS over Wi-Fi has become the norm as more medical devices evolve with embedded Wi-Fi chips and hospitals seek to leverage their existing Wi-Fi network investment. Today, Ekahau’s RTLS uses active RFID-over-Wi-Fi technology and offers an open API to integrate with other devices, so that hospitals have a future-proof, whole-hospital solution that optimizes patient queuing and more.

Say good-bye to waiting rooms, for good. Joint Implant Surgeons of Florida uses RTLS today to optimize wait times and patient queuing based on the type of patient visit and average care times. Read more about RTLS-based patient queuing at: Joint Implant Surgeons of Florida.

Ekahau RTLS Wi-Fi badge can message patients and caregivers to minimize wait times and even alert if a patients wanders into a restricted area.

Real Time Location System (RTLS) help hospitals create more efficient emergency care

During such large-scale tragedies, like the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon earlier this week, hundreds of patients are rushed to hospitals for immediate emergency care.  At such challenging times, it’s imperative for hospitals to move patients faster through triage and provide them with immediate attention.

Investing in RTLS technology can help emergency rooms more effectively handle huge influx of patients. This system provides hospital staff with real-time actionable information regarding the location, status and movement of equipment and people.

Even before the patients reach the hospital, RTLS technology can easily identify the number of emergency lifesaving equipment available and their exact locations. Put simply, hospital caregivers do not need to manually look for beds, stretchers, rooms or for specific doctors and nurses. With just a click of a button, medical equipment, whether the medical equipment is clean or dirty and caregiver’s location is instantly available. With all this information already available, the staff can invest their time in patient care.

To elaborate further, the system keeps a tab on all mobile equipment, such as radiology scanners, X-ray machines, ultrasound devices, infusion pumps, wheelchairs, including drug, blood and tissue availability.

To read more about how installing RTLS is the future of hospital management, click here.

The Ekahau Vision™ RTLS software makes locating lifesaving medical equipment easy.

In RFID Tags are Important, But Business Intelligence is Essential

Wi-Fi Staff Badge Tag with LED display.

While tag form factor, size and battery life are important when considering RFID for tracking assets, patients, staff and workflows you may be missing one important piece: measurable and manageable business intelligence.  Business Intelligence distills and reveals only the relevant trends and patterns around where and when your assets are used, how long patients wait, where and when they wait, how often things go as planned, how much time your caregivers spend on care activities, and much more. Location is great, but without intelligence, you’re left with an ultra-accurate way to find a wheelchair on a map. By having business intelligence, you can make better decisions, automate manual processes using your tags and communicate faster and better based on location-triggered events, severity, event type, time, motion detection, sensor status, etc.

Ekahau Vision 2.0 is a business intelligence software platform that happens to use location-awareness as the basis for analysis. Together with Ekahau Wi-Fi tags, Ekahau Vision™ is designed to improve operational decision-making with location and event-based alerting that assists with inventory management, workflow automation, trend reporting with customized dashboards, and ensures temperature monitoring for regulatory compliance.

Just some of the latest features include:

User-Friendly Messaging Tab for all Ekahau tags. Simply type your text message on screen to send texts to Ekahau badge-holders.

• Customizable Messaging Escalation Rules – managers can pre-define message escalation rules based on a minimum required number of possible respondents
• Forensics Replay™ allows managers to re-trace steps and view the movement history post-emergencies, for individuals using the B4 Wi-Fi badges
• User-Defined Event Categorization based on user defined values (e.g. Code White events vs. Code Blue events)
• Enhanced Access Control – User-level segregation and Group-level segregation allows administrators to flexibly manage permissions to view assets and people

Top reasons to implement Business Intelligence Through Location:

• Lower inventory expenses, maximize equipment utilization rates, shorten equipment search times, prevent theft and automate asset maintenance with real-time visibility into the location and status of medical equipment (i.e. dirty/clean, broken/fixed, in use/available), using your existing Wi-Fi network.
• Reduce patient wait times and increase throughput with real-time monitoring. Automatically alert caregivers of patient activity/inactivity, movements and automate routine work-flows with automated alerts that improve patient care, safety and staff productivity.
• Reduce security response times and risk of injury in cases of staff duress, with wearable Wi-Fi based badges that instantly alert security badges with a staff member’s exact location or geo-fence zones for automated notifications and shrinkage prevention.
• Ensure that blood, tissue, medication and food refrigerators are kept at safe temperatures 24/7 with automated, real-time temperature monitoring, Joint Commission reports and automated alerting to prevent spoilage.

Come by booth #642 at RFID Journal Live to see our Real-Time Location Solutions using RFID-over-Wi-Fi and find out how our solutions can benefit your organization.

Wish My Doctor’s Office Used this RTLS Patient Queuing Solution

 

RFID Journal reported Ekahau’s RTLS (RFID-over-Wi-Fi™) technology solution with Solstice Medical, driving patient satisfaction at an orthopedic clinic in Florida. Joint Implant Surgeons of Florida (JISF) sees an average of 165 to 185 patients daily for initial consultations, follow-up appointments, injections, and pre and post operation appointments. JISF wanted to improve their patient wait times and collect more statistics for workflow optimization because the manual written information they tried to collect was, “very difficult to evaluate.” JISF installed the Ekahau RTLS hardware and software with Solstice Medical’s Real Time Patient Flow software to improve patient and caregiver workflows.

When a patient checks in for their appointment, they are given an Ekahau RFID/WiFi badge. The JISF staff members hands the patient a badge and chooses the badge number in their patient records software to link the badge to the patient. Then, the patient can receive custom text messages updating them on wait time status or appointment instructions and the clinic’s staff can record and analyze wait room time, exam room wait time before patient sees doctor, time spent with doctor, when injections are given in real-time and track overall patient data by appointment type.

JISF instituted the following improvements by adding RTLS business intelligence data to their clinic:

• Improved patient scheduling by recording and analyzing wait time tracking and collecting an overall average length of time for specific procedures
• Improved medication ordering and reduced waste by tracking the average injections per day
• Improved procedure efficiency by identifying the highest performing staff member for specific procedures and allowing them to train the rest of the staff in the procedure they excel at performing for better overall patient care
• Improved communication by notifying patients using Ekahau badges about any delays using patient/physician dwell time data recorded wirelessly using chair level accuracy
• Improved exam room wait times by reducing room allocation per physician so patients are seen quicker once they move to an exam room

Solstice Medical reported that the RTLS integration at JISF was seamless from start-up to implementation. Please read Ekahau’s case study and the RFID Journal article on JISF’s RTLS solution for more information on this innovative and well implemented solution for physician’s office efficiency. 

 

Ekahau B4 Wi-Fi badges are used to track the locations of employees and patients. In the clinic’s injection area, staff members press a button on a patient’s tag after administering a shot of medication.

Patient Satisfaction Surveys and Their Tie-In to Hospital Revenues

Patient satisfaction is important to hospitals for numerous reasons. Healthcare professionals want their patients to feel taken care of while at their facility. If a hospital is known for quality care and patient satisfaction then more patients will choose that hospital over other local options. Beyond brand reputation issues, hospitals care about patient satisfaction scores because it could play a larger role in Medicare reimbursements and regulatory requirements.

Medicare is tying reimbursements to patient satisfaction scores through the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) which is publically posted. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services rates healthcare organizations using patient satisfaction surveys through their program called HCAHPS. Hospitals could lose reimbursement money from Medicare, if they do not have strong patient satisfaction scores. A Hospital and Health Network article states that, Medicare is expected to add more than 20 million new patients in the next few years. High patient satisfaction surveys will be even more important in the future because a larger section of a hospital’s revenue quotient will be from Medicare patients; high patient satisfaction scores will be needed for the hospital to be financially successful.

If you are interested in more information on the changing health laws, please check out this blog article from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

What is the HCAHPS survey?

Since 2006, the HCAHPS set the national standard for patient satisfaction and allows consumers the opportunity to compare hospitals. The HCAHPS survey assesses 18 patient perspectives on care with the patient rating items that encompass eight key topics: communication with doctors, communication with nurses, responsiveness of hospital staff, pain management, communication about medicines, discharge information, cleanliness of the hospital environment, and quietness of the hospital environment. The survey also includes four screener questions and five demographic items, which are used to adjust the mix of patients across hospitals, for analytical purposes—the survey is 27 questions in length. More information can be found on the HCAHPS FAQ and an example of HCAHPS survey questions is located here.

How can Ekahau Wi-Fi-over-RFID™ (RTLS) help?

The picture above shows Ekahau Mobile Vision™ iPhone application as a caregiver accepts the staff alarm notification. Once the caregiver presses accept on the alert, their acceptance is captured in real-time and recorded in the Ekahau Vision™ software and can be used for workflow optimization.

Ekahau RTLS solutions offer automated workflows that give real-time location information to Hospital staff. Real-time location information using Ekahau Vision™ software ultimately improves patient satisfaction scores because it gives hospital administrators the metrics and business intelligence to improve workflow processes and reduce patient wait times.

The majority of the HCAHPS questions are directly related to communication and nurse rounding. Ekahau Vision™ can create customized automated rounding reminders and other messages using an Ekahau badge. The caregiver can confirm the task is complete using a button on the Ekahau badge which records the action complete in the Ekahau Vision™ software system and via mobile phone (Ekahau Mob

ile Vision™ application). The real-time location information from an action completion guides administrator’s to patient response time and rounding habits without having to burden the caregivers with hand written logs and human error.

Additionally, Ekahau Vision™ offers an open API which allows location information to be easily integrated into the hospital’s current nurse’s call system or other existing communication

systems. Ekahau’s versatility makes obtaining and using real-time location data simple and the platform can be connected with existing systems such as Cerner and Epic, and other HIS and HER systems to connect caregiver and patient interaction times and other workflows.

For more information on Ekahau RTLS integrations, read our case study from Joint Implants of Florida. Ekahau partnered with a third party to create improved scheduling and shorter wait times for an orthopedic clinic.