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Tracking of medical assets

ASSET TRACKING

Memorial Medical Center in Lufkin, Texas, deploy a new solution that employs passive RFID tags for tracking assets. The system, Star Trax, is being provided by US Med-Equip that provides rental, sales and biomedical service of movable biomedical equipment. It costs considerably less than real-time location systems (RTLS) utilizing active radio frequency identification tags.

The Star Trax system features RFID tags encased in hard plastic, each encoded with a unique ID number that is also printed as a bar code on the tag. The tag is affixed to a piece of medical equipment, with its unique ID and a description of that object stored in the hosted Radiant RFID software. Memorial Medical Center has attached EPC Gen 2 passive RFID tags with printed bar codes to the front to its infusion pumps, deep vein thrombosis (DVT) pumps and portable oxygen containers.

To make identifying a location easier, the medical center is applying passive UHF RFID tags with printed bar codes to the walls throughout its facility, and is storing each tag's ID with the details of that area in the Star Trax software. When personnel locate or move an asset, they can use a TERTIUM Technology Blueberry UHF reader with a Bluetooth connection to the tablet to scan or read its RFID inlay and also read the wall tag, thereby linking the asset to that particular location

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