Baystate Health has recently signed a deal to implement Awarepoint Corporation's real-time location system in its three hospitals.
The deal will enable Baystate Health to monitor the location of patients, staff and assets, as well as the condition of equipment – whether it has been properly sterilized – through the awareAssets application, as part of Awarepoint's aware360°Suite of RTLS solutions.
"We strive to deliver the highest quality, lowest cost care to our patients, and our partnership with Awarepoint will help us reduce our cost of operations, save clinicians time, and increase staff productivity while improving the quality of care," Joel Vengco, vice president and CIO at Baystate Health, said in a statement. "We are very excited about the rapid time-to-value that Awarepoint delivers, and appreciate the fact that we can implement RTLS without interfering with our mission-critical Wi-Fi network."
Awarepoint's RTLS system will first be implemented at Baystate Medical Center, with Baystate Mary Lane Hospital and Baystate Franklin Medical Center to follow.
The solution attempts to address a main problem facing hospitals today, which is inefficiency at locating essential equipment, such as pumps, ventilators and wheelchairs. In addition to hospitals spending thousands of dollars on new equipment, the issue causes reduced patient care, as nurses and staff members spend a lot of time trying to track down equipment, decreased operating room functionality and delays in transferring patients from departments.
"The Awarepoint solution will help us manage assets across our entire healthcare system more efficiently," Vengco said. "Their aware360°Platform will provide the foundation upon which we can expand our RTLS capabilities to address other tough challenges in the future, including automated temperature monitoring, patient flow – particularly in our high-volume departments -- and enterprise-wide capacity management."
Awarepoint is glad to offer its services to Baystate Health.
"Hospitals and health systems are being asked to do more with less, so we constantly strive to help our client organizations deliver the most efficient, safe, high-quality care," said Jay Deady, CEO at Awarepoint. "It is gratifying to partner with another top-tier health system like Baystate Health, which has been widely recognized as a premier healthcare organization known for providing outstanding clinical care to a diverse patient population that other healthcare facilities try to emulate. I also am pleased to see our client base continue to expand in the Northeastern U.S."
Awarepoint recently launched a new bed and bay sensor that allows for the precise tracking of mobile equipment, patients and caregivers in areas with tight-bed spacing, which mainly includes emergency departments and pre- and post-anesthesia care.
This will provide hospitals with the ability to obtain accurate data about caregiver and treatment times for both billing purposes and measuring the productivity of its practices and staff.
Edited by
Braden Becker
