January 14, 2009 -- NEC Unified Solutions, Inc., a specialist in enterprise business communications, announced that St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center of Syracuse, NY has deployed a wireless temperature monitoring platform to help staff monitor critical refrigerated healthcare assets. St. Joseph's has leveraged NEC's communications integration expertise and AeroScout's Wi-Fi-based active RFID tags to help maintain regulatory compliance, increase staff efficiency and improve safety.
Healthcare regulatory organizations, such as The Joint Commission set stringent standards for frequent temperature monitoring of refrigerated materials in hospitals. For nursing, laboratory and pharmacy staff, maintaining these standards has traditionally been a manual process that consumes caregivers' time on a daily basis. By deploying NEC's and AeroScout's platform, St. Joseph's healthcare workers are spared the manual tasks of monitoring and logging refrigerator temperature data several times a day for every refrigeration unit. The wireless system helps ensure safe temperature ranges and compliance with requirements of The Joint Commission and other regulatory bodies by generating reports on status, trends, alarms and corrective actions taken.
At St. Joseph's, AeroScout Wi-Fi tags are placed inside refrigerators and freezers containing temperature-sensitive items, such as vaccines, pharmaceuticals, tissues, blood bags, organs and patient test results. The tags wirelessly send temperature readings over the hospital's Cisco Unified Wireless Network to AeroScout's MobileView software. If the temperature exceeds or goes below a set threshold, an alert is triggered and sent to hospital staff.
"We are very impressed with NEC's familiarity with our communications infrastructure and the healthcare industry. Their knowledge as a solutions integrator adds to their value by creating new technology possibilities and helping to ensure our facility runs more efficiently, while providing a measurable return on investment," comments Chuck Fennell, CIO, St. Joseph's. "Automatic monitoring and reporting on asset temperatures has helped us improve compliance and enhanced the ability of our nurses and clinical staff to focus on their most important task, providing the best patient care possible."
AeroScout's Healthcare Solutions RFID platform, which is endorsed by the American Hospital Association (AHA), can be used for applications in addition to temperature monitoring, such as tracking and managing medical equipment. AeroScout's Asset Management solution uses the same proprietary MobileView software and Wi-Fi tags as the temperature monitoring application to track the location, status and condition of medical equipment. Over time, St. Joseph's may choose to track and monitor more than 5,000 assets within the hospital's walls.
"Increasingly, hospitals like St. Joseph's are taking greater advantage of their standard Wi-Fi networks by implementing wireless temperature monitoring and asset management solutions," says Gabi Daniely, VP of marketing and product strategy at AeroScout. "Leveraging hospitals' existing wireless infrastructures makes AeroScout's Healthcare Solutions cost effective and easy to deploy."
"At the end of the day, NEC and AeroScout have helped the staff at St. Joseph's emphasize patient care, which is a cornerstone of NEC's UNIVERGE360 vision," adds Lou Van De Water, vice president of eastern regional sales, NEC Unified Solutions. "By combining our technical and vertical industry expertise, we continue to bring value to the people such as nurses, lab and pharmacy staff, who truly drive business communications."
On the Web:
www.necunified.com
www.univerge360.com
www.aeroscout.com
www.sjhsyr.org
www.jointcommission.org
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