Introduction - Health Care
Etcom has partnered with Wren Medical Systems,
a Chicago based company, to develop applications for the health care
markets. Wren is in the business of providing and maintaining medical
equipment (mainly infusion pumps). Wren is managing today about 200,000
units at over 200 locations in North America. Based on that
collaboration Etcom is developing with Wren two RFID based solutions:
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 Assets Management of Medical Equipment
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This is behaving more as a project than an application product. Wren
is leasing equipment to health care services providers and also performs
routine cleaning, calibration and repair services. Wren collects
payments on all equipments in use and in addition for a pre-agreed level
of inventory. For optimizing Wren’s revenues they need continuous
reports on equipment movements and inventory levels from several
hundreds of locations.
The idea is to cover at every
customer/location the equipment storage and service area with a reader
that sequentially performs inventory counts. Since the same system is
used for manually registering servicing procedures, rentals and returns
the inventory level can be used to avoid reporting errors or delays.
On the other hand a hand held terminal
(PDA) can be used to detect and locate lost items.
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Remote Monitoring of Storage Boxes
for Critical Medical Items (AP4) This is an application product for the
Health Care market identified and defined by our partner Wren Medical
Systems. This Application Product is designed to monitor and control
kits of various medical items (medications and accessories) that are
used at critical events. For being ready for use in such critical events
all items in the kit have to be in good condition, packed and sealed
(locked) as a kit ready for use as needed. Pre-authorized personnel have
the permit to unlock a kit and consume items from it.
The condition, inventory and
consumption are all monitored and controlled by taking advantage of
various identification technologies. This is a vital tool for some
service companies that supply the kits to the health care organizations
as a service with revenues coming from the service and consumption. The
service company is also responsible that the kits are complete (all
items) and ready to be used (expiration).
The idea is to develop
a system that can communicate with the boxes, monitor and register all
openings, consumed items, and status of contents. The box is actually a
reader that can read all items in it and report their information over
the web.
This
product is planned to be developed later this year (2008).
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