Tech for the Hospitals

A child checks in to have a cyst removed at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and the admissions clerk gives her a disposable ID bracelet loaded with her identification, her date of admission and her physician’s name and contact number. Her worried parents get bracelets with smart tracking technology embedded in them, too.

The hospital uses this smartcard ID technology to ensure that only authorized family members remain in the surgical and post-operative areas, and that intruders don’t interfere with the work of doctors and nurses. Medical personnel verify each visitor’s ID bracelet by using a portable LCD monitor display with height-adjustable Ergotron brackets; an optical mouse and a keyboard tray; a Wyse thin client terminal with a wireless PCMCIA card; and scanning technologies.

Rush University Medical Center’s system was built by Vernon Hills, Illinois-based technology services specialist CDW.

The consensus now in the industry is that these kinds of technologies are “critical” to improving healthcare “from both the patient and the medical side of the operation,” said Gina Wilde, national manager, healthcare for Eugene, Oregon-based data collection specialist Datalogic ADC.

Across the country, whether it is in the form of a bracelet ID or smart ID tags affixed to bags of blood, IV bags or surgical tools, hospitals and health care organizations are adding smartcard technology to their IT mix. Hospitals, physicians and clinics are currently implementing smartcards in combination with identity software solutions.

The technologies, part of electronic medical records systems, help manage the overall safety and security of patients, and their deployment “is becoming more mainstream,” said Dr. Dick Wuest, an emeritus professor of pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and an expert in healthcare technology. “For healthcare, it is vital that the information is “accurate, easily understood and easy to access.”

The U.S. has been slow to embrace the smartcard for healthcare, even though it has rapidly become a technological feature in hospitals and clinics overseas, according to the SMART Association, an industry trade group based in Citrus Heights, Calif.

Countries with national healthcare systems – France and Germany – have to date issued over 150 million smartcards that carry health data, according to the association.

But the U.S. has stronger privacy regulations than other countries, and this has slowed implementation of the technologies here. There is also a generation gap in the usage of wireless technologies, favoring the young, not the old, who more often visit hospitals.

Dr. Pedro Reyes, an associate professor of operations and supply chain management at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business and director of the university’s Center for Excellence in Supply Chain Management, said the use of tracking technologies in U.S. medicine is only now becoming a normal solution “because users are now understanding how it can be used.”