Infonaut, a Toronto-based IT
company that specializes in innovative ways of organizing healthcare
data, was recently featured in the November Edition of
Popular Science.
The magazine looks at Infonaut's "Hospital Watch Live"--a system that
tracks the movements of people and devices in hospitals "to record the
location of anything that could possibly transport microbes, including
the doctors and nurses themselves."
"The fastest way to spread disease is to pack a lot of sick people in
one place. That's why hospitals are such a health hazard� equipment and
personnel move from patient to patient and carry infectious agents in
the process. One solution is to keep better track of every patient,
wheelchair and IV stand to locate what's spreading disease and what
needs to be sterilized, and one Cana- dian company is the first to
deploy a system to do just that. Infonaut's Hospital Watch Live system
uses a combination of tracking software and inexpensive radio-frequency
ID tags to record the location of anything that could possibly
transport microbes, including the doctors and nurses themselves.
Wireless receivers throughout the building transmit the position of
each tag to a central computer about every three seconds"
read full story
here (pg 40)
original source
Popular Science