Thomas Heideman

But with Ekahau and using our Wi-Fi network we will receive 3,000 tags and it will cover both buildings," says Thomas Heideman, Manager of Clinical Engineering at Palmetto Health Richland.The Ekahau deployment covers the main hospital building and Cancer Center.

"RFID would have only covered one building," Heideman told Wi-Fi Planet.
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"It was up to department directors to keep track of their equipment," says Heideman.

"We are under tough standards and not meeting these standards could affect the hospital financially," says Thomas Heideman, manager of clinical engineering at Palmetto Health.
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"The Clinical Engineering staff would have to look in closets, patient rooms, and sending/receiving rooms on every floor for some of these devices," says Heideman.
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Heideman, who led the asset tracking project, wanted a solution that could take advantage of the existing wireless infrastructure.After working with several vendors, Palmetto chose vendor Ekahau's Real-Time Location System (RTLS), a Wi-Fi-based asset-tracking system.The solution cost between $300,000 and $400,000 and includes 3,000 tags."We received a couple quotes from RFID vendors, but, for the same price range, they could only wire a smaller area and provide 400 tags," says Heideman.
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"We can program the tags to turn on more frequently if needed or turn on when they're moved, and we can program them over the Wi-Fi network," says Heideman."We're still experimenting with what works best."

Though Palmetto hasn't tagged all of its equipment, it has tagged enough to notice a benefit."We had a 97% completion on infusion pump maintenance last month because of the asset tracking system, which is a definite improvement over our completion rates before," says Heideman.