Managing beds in an emergency room is no small task – with patients constantly streaming in and out of rooms, being tested, released from care, or wheeled into surgery, it takes supreme organization skills and constant movement to keep up with the newest information. Even with the most impeccably organized system, though, there are fallbacks. Rooms and beds aren’t cleaned in time, there are bed mix-ups, and ultimately, lags in actual care.

To help combat this problem, Christiana Care Health System in Wilmington, DE, has released an integrated health care system that uses RFID cards and strategically placed readers to help with patient management, workflow, and cleaning. When a patient is checked in, they are assigned an ID badge that has an RFID chip with a unique identifying number that is tagged to the patient’s information in the hospital’s database.
As the patient moves throughout the emergency room, RFID readers (spaced about 60 to 90 feet apart) receive signals from unique patient cards – tracking their movements throughout the hospital and throughout treatment.
The RFID badges at Christiana are also integrated with the hospital’s bed management software system – as patients move in and out of beds, the software and RFID cards cooperate to reveal which rooms are ready for cleaning and which are still occupied. This addition helps maintenance staff keep rooms readily available for the new patients that are always arriving.
Staff members like nurses and doctors are also using RFID badges in this situation – and are instantaneously assigned rotations and checkups on patients based on their location in the emergency room. Such an accurate degree of tracking and assignment is in place to ensure efficiency and maximizing the quality of care.
Officials say the main goal in installing the RFID system was to get the patient to the right place the first time- reducing inaccuracies and increasing the overall quality of care – and the system has indeed reduced administrative time for care staff and increased accuracy to a point where more time can be dedicated to the sick individual.