Mr. Andy Willis

Andy Willis As Chief Technology Officer of American Project Services, Mr. Willis is responsible for technology development and integration.Andy has a varied background that includes law enforcement and security in addition to technology.Andy has participated in several RFID research projects in various sectors of government and industry.Andy worked with world renowned scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in their National Security Division to develop an RFID application to address Passenger Baggage Matching for domestic and international airlines.Mr. Willis was responsible for briefings to members of the United States Congress and Senate as well as key members of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Commerce (DOC), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Security Agency (NSA) regarding the technology.Andy received a Bachelors degree in Criminology from Memphis State University.

On Friday, Andy Willis, American Project Services head of research, showed how tagged items could be easily loaded into a container without having to enter data manually or by using a bar code scanner.

This system generated a temporary manifest of what was in the container.That manifest could be linked to an RFID tag for the container, he said.

Andy Willis

Andy Willis

Andy Willis

"Trauma centers deal with patients with the most critical physical injuries, and in many cases every second counts," says Andy Willis, president at American Project Services.Ultimately, the goal of the project is to record how long patients are at each location in the trauma center and thereby provide the center with data it could use to improve its processes and services, as well as its patients' experience.

The project's first phase, which ended mid April, was to determine if the technology is reliable and can produce usable results.During a period of three months, RFID tags were attached to patients (the trauma center sees an average of 60 a day) as they entered the facility.According to American Project Services, while tracking more than 5,000 patients, the technology worked faultlessly."We had 100 percent accuracy in tracking every tagged patient throughout the center," says Willis.

Funded by a special grant from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the trial is the latest in a number of attempts to examine issues critical to trauma centers nationwide.Previous studies include one in which researchers monitored trauma center workflow manually using clipboards and stopwatches.Later, a trial involving bar codes was tried.In both studies, the data was compromised because the research methods constantly reminded the staff at the trauma that their performance was being monitored."When people know they are being watched, they tend to perform differently," says Willis.

By automating the collection of data, the American Project Services trial showed that RFID technology could track patients without distorting the study's results.Twenty-five RFID readers were deployed throughout the approximately 250,000-square-foot facility, which includes three X-ray rooms, two CAT (computed axial tomography) scan rooms, two intensive-care units, an operating room and several general areas.Only the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan room was not covered."There has not been enough research on the effects of an RFID reader on MRI readings," says Willis.