White Paper: Healthcare RTLS: From A To ZigBee… The Truth About Sensor Networks

Active radio frequency ID (RFID) - Real-time Location Systems (RTLS) continue to emerge as an important strategic capability for many industries. In hospitals particularly, active RFID-RTLS can play an important role in automation of common tasks - improving operational efficiency, increasing patient flow and enhancing patient safety. Knowing the location, status and movement of equipment and people can provide a rich warehouse of information that can be mined and used to improve hospital business processes and asset utilization, reduce capital expense and rental costs, and improve staff productivity.

To obtain these benefits in a healthcare environment, RFID-RTLS must be fast and inexpensive to deploy, must retrofit easily into existing buildings without patient care disruption and must allow for easy changes and updates to accommodate the ever-changing hospital physical plant. Most importantly, they must co-exist with other hospital infrastructure technologies, such as LAN's, WLAN's (Wi-Fi), and the growing variety of network-enabled and wireless medical equipment.

Today, myriad technology options exist each purporting to provide the best RFID-RTLS for the specific needs of the healthcare market.