Patient Care Technology Systems (PCTS), a subsidiary of Consulier Engineering Inc., announced that it has signed an agreement with CenTrak Inc., to provide integrated workflow automation solutions to healthcare facilities. PCTS will utilize CenTrak's patented InTouchCare, a hybrid technology that combines a new generation of Infrared and RFID to track people and equipment to a room and individual bay.
CenTrak developed InTouchCare technology to provide a "location-certainty" by overcoming the inaccuracies of "location-estimation" hindered by issues of RF penetration of walls, ceilings and floors. CenTrak patient and equipment tags use Gen2IR infrared light signals which cannot penetrate walls to accurately locate people and movable medical equipment to a specific room. The active-RFID component is used to communicate the location information back to the network for maximum tag capacity and a fast response time. In this way, CenTrak provides room and sub-room level accuracy with certainty, not based on an estimate. Installation of a CenTrak InTouchCare network is simplified by using battery-powered components which eliminate wiring and offer plug-and-play installation functionality. With RF and Infrared operating simultaneously, the sensors can operate continuously for up to five years on a set of batteries.
PCTS pioneered the use of real-time locating systems (RTLS) to automatically track patients and assets in emergency and surgical services departments and today provides purpose-built solutions for departmental to enterprise-wide patient flow needs. Department-specific process rules recognize and timestamp patient care milestones based on the measurement of location, movement and interactions between patients, staff and mobile medical equipment.
The location information together with patient data from other hospital information systems is visualized for caregivers in map and status screen views of patient flow. Additional intelligence interprets the meaning of patient status events and notifies appropriate staff in real-time. Caregivers interact with the web-based tracking software as their centralized workflow communication and management portal. In this way, caregivers are able to better anticipate and manage their workflows as they coordinate care between them. PCTS tracking solutions have supported over four million emergency department and perioperative patient encounters at leading hospitals nationwide.
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