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In mass casualty events, chaos often reigns, and locating patients and doctors becomes a difficult – yet crucial – task. A new system, recently tested in a national drill at Rambam Health Care Campus (RHCC), has succeeded in tracking and monitoring the healers and the hurt
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Even in the most tumultuous situations, doctors and patients can now be easily found.
In a recent national drill (“Turning Point 4”) that checked Israel’s and RHCC’s readiness for chemical war, a new tracking and monitoring system was tested. The results of this joint experiment of the Technion and RHCC, and the companies, IBM and AeroScout yielded excellent results. The system,based on electronic transmitting tags, succeeded in tracking and monitoring all patients and medical personnel in real time.
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The new tracking and monitoring system that was tested.
Photo credit: RHCC.© |
The test was the initiative of Dr. Shlomi Israelit, director of RHCC Department of Emergency and Urgent Care. During the drill, 50 ‘injured’ people (volunteers acting as casualties, Ed.) and 55 medical personnel, doctors and nurses were outfitted with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. The data collected by the researchers enabled them to monitor, in real time, the movements of the medical team and patients in the area of the drill.
The experiment – from its planning to its performance – was coordinated by Technion doctoral student Yariv Marmour, along with Dr. Israelit; Operational Manager of the Department of Emergency and Urgent Care, Kobi Moskowitz; and IBM researcher Boaz Carmeli. The experiment was conducted with the encouragement of RHCC Director Prof. Rafi Beyar, and his two deputy directors, Dr. Yaron Bar-El and Prof. Shimon Reisner, who also helped lead the drill at RHCC.
The system is produced by the AeuroScout company, a worldwide leader in the wireless tracking and monitoring of assets – equipment and people – in the workplace.
Test results indicated that the system can save many hours of work, and can help manage the medical team, as it moves from department to department. This is crucial is a mass casualty event, during which the medical staff and the wounded are in constant motion throughout the hospital. Even patients sent to specific units may continue to be shifted to different locations, and their monitoring can be difficult and time-consuming.
The system reduces the time needed to find personnel or patients and gives an accurate picture of their whereabouts. In addition, it can help mobilize the medical team to where it is most needed by providing data on the ratio between patients to doctors in each department.
The Technion’s Laboratory of Service Systems Engineering is currently exploring the possibility of using the technology in similar future drills and other health systems.
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