Belfast Trust Manages 40,000 Health Records with RFID
The Belfast Health and Social Care Trust provides health services to 340,000 people in the greater Belfast area. The Trust stores, accesses, and manages nearly 4,000,000 health records in six archive libraries and in external storage service providers.
In order to be largely paperless by 2020, the Trust replaced manual barcode file capture with automated, RFID-based document management.
To achieve this goal, the trust decided to integrate Kathrein Solutions RFID-IoT gateways and the Kathrein Solutions CrossTalk IoT suite.
Process Requirement
The Trust operates various IT systems that store patients' health information - but the comprehensive files are stored in paper form. The previous procedure - barcode identification - required a high level of resources and personnel and therefore burdened both medical staff and patients. For example, patient files were not available in time for treatment appointments.
These delays in the processes burdened in particular the employees with direct patient contact.
As part of its digitization strategy for document management, the Trust had already invested in several proofs of concept for RFID. By optimizing the management of patient records, the Trust can save time and money on document storage and retrieval.
Solution
Today every file has an RFID-Tag and every archive, every file trolley, and every hospital corridor has been equipped with RFID readers from Kathrein Solutions.
The employees use a Handheld-Reader to locate and identify the files. Kinsetsu has integrated this document management with the CrossTalk Software Suite so that document management staff can easily monitor where patient records are located inside the hospital. This enables the Trust to create valuable business intelligence.
Technology Partner
Hardware & Software
- Kathrein Solutions: ARU 3500 IoT Gateways
- Kathrein Solutions: IoT-Suite CrossTalk
Advantages
- 66,000 manual barcode scans per month were replaced by automated RFID-based document management.
- Shorter filing and retrieval times
- Reduction of missing files
- Improved traceability and procedure of furnishing proof
- Kathrein CrossTalk IoT-Suite links the Trust's isolated IoT projects with each other
Outlook
- Data generated with CrossTalk from the readers enables the Trust's staff to better understand trends in device usage and maintenance cycles and to identify other Trust applications that could be transformed in the future.
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