Ekahau Inc., a leading provider of Wi-Fi based Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), announced that it is working with GTSI Corp.(R), an IT enterprise infrastructure solutions and services provider to government, to deploy the Ekahau Real Time Location System (RTLS) in the Blanchfield Army Community Hospital at Fort Campbell, Ky., home of the 101st Airborne. Ekahau RTLS will be used to wirelessly track and manage medical assets at the 241-bed facility, one of the busiest military medical facilities in the world. Ekahau RTLS is being installed under GTSI's Information Technology Enterprise Solutions-2H (ITES) contract. Under the contract, GTSI's project management team will oversee the project.
Ekahau RTLS provides accurate, real-time and historical location information about the location and status of mobile assets and people. Using Ekahau RTLS, Blanchfield Army Community Hospital staff will be able to continually monitor the location of mobile medical equipment, such as IV pumps, hospital beds, wheelchairs and other clinical assets.
"GTSI is proud to be a part of this mission-critical and cost-effective solution to healthcare management," said Bill Weber, GTSI senior vice president of programs and services. "We all want to help our military hospitals provide the best care to those who have served our nation. In today's healthcare environment, there is little down time. Ekahau's RTLS solution works with the current wireless infrastructure, eliminating the need for another infrastructure layer, and is transparent to the patient. The live implementation can start locating crucial equipment immediately, thereby saving lives.
"Through our important partnership with Ekahau, GTSI is developing this mission-critical solution so that it can be reproduced for every military hospital that has a wireless network or a need."
Initially, GTSI will install 200 Ekahau Wi-Fi tags to track critical patient care equipment throughout the entire campus.
"We are honored to be able to support Blanchfield Army Medical Center and help them drive new efficiencies in their operations at such a demanding time," said Tuomo Rutanen, vice president of business development at Ekahau. "Our partnership with GTSI, who has deep roots in serving military hospitals, provides military healthcare systems an easy way to procure, deploy and integrate RTLS into their daily operations."
The Ekahau RTLS solution tracks assets by using one of many types of Ekahau tags attached to an object or person, or via internal Wi-Fi radios, such as those already installed in a wide variety of computing devices. Because Ekahau RTLS operates by using the facility's existing Wi-Fi network, it can be deployed in a few weeks and does not require a lengthy, expensive build out of proprietary tracking infrastructure.
Ekahau technology is deployed in more than 150 hospitals around the world, including D.D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center (Ft. Gordon, GA) and more than a dozen other military facilities.
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