Healthcare organizations that have mobilized applications for smartphones or other handheld devices understand the competitive advantages they can gain, since having more detailed and relevant information on hand can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. But as the enterprise mobility landscape continues to evolve, more organizations are looking to context-aware computing to bridge the gap between simply sharing data and sharing relevant information.
In a context-aware environment, wireless devices such as environmental sensors, RFID tags and smartphones send location, presence and other status information across the network, reports TMCnet.com. Specialized software captures, stores and analyzes the data, sending it back over the network to provide context at the end device as needed. The whole idea is to leverage data in a way that helps people, or other systems, make decisions faster. By 2013, Gartner analyst William Clark says more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives, adding that mobility is a subset that accounts for 80 percent of what's happening in this arena.
One healthcare organization exploring the potential of context awareness is Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (TMH) in Florida, which has been using location services for asset tracking since late 2006. As of this spring, the hospital had tagged roughly 2,700 medical and wireless devices and updated the wireless infrastructure to make tracking possible anywhere in the 800,000-square-foot facility, according to the TMCnet.com report. As a result, accuracy now falls within four feet, according to Jay Adams, IT enterprise architect for the hospital. From AeroScout's MobileView 4 application, nurses can more accurately locate needed IV pumps by drilling down to CAD-based floor maps imported into the Cisco Mobility Services Engine (MSE) and fed into the asset-tracking system.
Sure, in the early days of asset tracking, nurses could detect device availability, but they still lost precious time rummaging through any number of storage closets on the floor. With context awareness, TMH's asset-tracking initiative has gone from fair to highly effective in enabling nurses to pinpoint supplies. More importantly, adding context awareness has led to improved patient care, increased productivity for the nursing staff and reduced spending on medical devices.
It's this kind of success that has prompted the hospital to consider how else it might take advantage of context-aware technology. For example, TMH is running a proof-of-concept test to see if it can eliminate manual recording of refrigeration temperatures by tagging the coolers and sending readings over the context-aware network to the MobileView software every 10 minutes. In the event temperatures should drop below a prescribed point, appropriate personnel would be alerted via their mobile devices. Based on the results of this pilot, the hospital would extend its monitoring presence to other systems, according to Adams.
While context-aware computing is not without its challenges--privacy, ownership of information and complexity are among the biggest--the writing on the wall says that as enterprises grow into their mobility initiatives, context-aware technology will play an increasingly important role for them.
HealthcareGoesMobile.com wants to know how your healthcare organization is applying context-awareness? How has context-aware computing affected productivity at the mobile point of care? Does your organization plan to integrate context-aware technology into its mobility initiatives during the next 12-18 months?
John Farrell participates in HealthcareGoesMobile.com as a community correspondent through Intel’s paid sponsorship with MedTech Publishing Company.
