Patient-Device Association and Disassociation with a Real-Time Location System

Abstract

In hospitals and clinics, medical devices incorrectly assigned to patients may cause various patient safety problems. Moreover, the unknown location of required mobile devices (intravenous pumps, cardiac monitors, etc.) represents additional issues for health providers such as unnecessary search effort, delays, and equipment underuse. To mitigate such issues, a patient-device connectivity management system that monitors and tracks patients and their assigned devices becomes an interesting option. Popular approaches for managing associations between patients and devices often involve bar-coding systems, which still require scanning time, are prone to errors, and do not solve equipment location issues. This thesis introduces a new system that exploits Real-Time Location System (RTLS) technology to track patients and devices and support simpler association by a nurse, until disassociation (voluntary or not) happens, at which point the nurse is notified. This system, called Real-time Patient-Device Association and Disassociation (RPDAD), interacts with nurses through their mobile device (tablet or phone). The system provides a new server-based application that interacts with an existing RTLS (hence enabling the reuse of current hospital infrastructure for mobile equipment tracking), a new Android mobile application for nurses, and a novel approach for automated disassociation tracking. The system was validated through proof-of-concept deployments in a university laboratory and in teaching hospital in Ontario, as well as with extensive testing for several configurations in a university laboratory. This thesis discuss-es the feasibility of the approach, its originality compared to the state of the art, and current technological limitations. We expect this system to help avoid usability and disassociation issues while increasing patient care quality and efficiency.