Southeast Alabama Medical Center upgrades Ekahau RTLS

Ekahau Inc., the performance leader in Wi-Fi-based Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), today announced that Southeast Alabama Medical Center (SAMC), a 370-bed regional hospital in Dothan, Ala., is upgrading its Ekahau RTLS to include campuswide monitoring of its refrigerators and freezers. SAMC's deployment of Ekahau's Wireless Temperature Monitoring and Management capabilities offers proof of how technologically advanced healthcare providers are leveraging their existing Wi-Fi network investments to support other mission-critical applications.

The accurate and real-time monitoring of hospital freezers and refrigerators has recently gained a lot of attention industrywide. Perishable items stored in hospitals include food, medicine, organs, blood and tissue samples, which not only have significant monetary value, but an impact on patient care. The management of these perishable items is vital to maintaining patient safety and compliance with Joint Commission regulations.

SAMC deployed Ekahau RTLS campuswide earlier in the year to track critical clinical assets, such as infusion pumps and patient monitors over its Cisco Unified Wireless network. From this initial asset tag deployment, SAMC expects to grow the RTLS system to track several thousand assets and is looking to take advantage of Ekahau's RTLS solution capabilities in other areas as well.

"We were in the market for a temperature monitoring and management solution because our procedures for managing our medicine and tissue refrigeration units were still built around manual processes," said Scott Lapham, senior network engineer at SAMC. "We ran the Ekahau system through a series of tests and found it to perform very reliably and without any problems. Any significant temperature variations in our freezers and refrigerators could mean significant losses, so we needed a system that can measure and communicate alarms wirelessly and reliably in multiple ways to our staff members."

"We are very pleased to have been selected to serve SAMC, a healthcare industry technology leader," said Tuomo Rutanen, senior vice president of Marketing and Business Development for Ekahau. "Our Wireless Temperature Monitoring and Management solution is the most advanced Wi-Fi solution in the marketplace today, providing enhanced alert delivery both locally on the tag itself, as well as through the network to a multitude of devices including PCs, wireless phones and Ekahau's T-301BD Wi-Fi pagers."

Ekahau introduced its Temperature Monitoring and Management solution earlier this year as an integral part of its high performance Real Time Location System. The system consists of Wi-Fi based T301t temperature monitoring tags, the Ekahau Positioning Engine and Tag Management platform, as well as Ekahau's Vision solution that manages all the system business rules, alarms and escalation paths. The T301t tags are able to measure temperatures from -200C to + 200 C, have on-board alarming via a flashing indicator and buzzer and have a very robust temperature reporting and alarming methodology that guarantees data delivery to the Ekahau server. The T301t tags are part of Ekahau's broad portfolio of Wi-Fi tag products that form the Ekahau RTLS solution.

The Wireless Temperature Monitoring and Management solution leverages the customer's existing Wi-Fi network and requires no proprietary or interfering infrastructure add-ons which are typical of other systems.