CenTrak recently announced the company introduced a new AlerTrak active RFID alarm for healthcare industry. The device can notify hospital personnel via an audible alert if specified people or assets leave or enter a restricted area, providing a valuable new tool for reducing infection spread, patient wandering, and inventory loss.
"A challenge for many hospitals is retention - keeping people and assets where they are supposed to be at all times," said Ari Naim, Ph.D., president and CEO of CenTrak. "AlerTrak actively helps healthcare organizations achieve this goal. For example, the device can be used to create local audible alerts if a quarantined patient leaves a designated area and hospital personnel can be notified immediately to correct the situation. This is especially important right now as the world faces a growing flu pandemic."
Originally developed for patient tag loss prevention, the IT-150 AlerTrak device triggers alerts when hospital-designated tags come within a pre-defined zone. It can be placed at egress and ingress points, or other critical locations. The device can be configured to generate quick audible alerts that can be leveraged by CenTrak solution provider partners.
"Our customers want their RTLS infrastructure to not only accurately track people and equipment, but to help their hospitals reduce equipment loss," said Neeraj Bhavani, CEO of Tagnos, provider of patient and asset tracking software. "After thorough testing, we are confident that CenTrak's AlerTrak solution will help our customers do just that, and we are deploying them as part of our total solution."
"Extending a RTLS from asset to patient tracking introduces many challenges," added Dr. Naim. "AlertTrak is just one element in our overall solution, but without it, hospitals can experience challenging tag losses. AlerTrak and other recent CenTrak innovations continue to distinguish us as the market leader in the very challenging environment of patient and staff tracking."
The AlerTrak alarm is remotely programmable and can be set to trigger within 50 feet of approaching tags. Normally the alerts will continue as long as a tag is in the specified zone, however the duration of the audible sound and electronic alert is configurable. Multiple AlerTraks can be connected to the network simultaneously. The device offers the same 100 percent certain performance that healthcare organizations have come to trust from CenTrak.
CenTrak's RTLS differs from legacy technologies in its use of Dual-TrackTM - a patented combination of second-generation infrared (Gen2IR) and active RFID technology. Battery-powered monitors transmit a unique room number using Gen2IR which is received by any tag in that room. The tag communicates the room number and its own unique ID using RF to the CenTrak Location Server via a hospital's existing wired or Wi-Fi network, where it can be accessed in real-time by hospital personnel.
Like light, Gen2IR will not pass through walls and does not suffer from traditional infrared line-of-sight limitations. Therefore, when a tag reads a room number, there are no errors. This is "certainty-based" RTLS. Unlike estimation-based information, certainty-based location data can be used to make automated decisions that can lead to significant improvements in key hospital initiatives such as bed turnover and OR throughput. Most healthcare workflow improvements can only be realized when the location data is certainty-based.
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