A comparison of commercial and custom-made electronic tracking systems to measure patient flow through an ambulatory clinic

International Journal of Health Geographics

Michael V. Boland³  Jeffrey Appelbaum²  Eric L. Singman¹  Ravi Pandit⁴  Sharif Vakili⁵ 

[1] Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA;Operations Integration, Johns Hopkins Health System, Baltimore, MD, USA;Division of Health Sciences Informatics, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA;Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA;Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA

关键词: Centrak;    Raspberry Pi;    Clinic management;    Healthcare management;    Patient tracking;    Patient flow;    Infrared (IR) tracking;    Real-time locating systems (RTLS);    Radio-frequency identification (RFID);   

Others  :  1231687
DOI  :  10.1186/s12942-015-0023-7

 received in 2015-05-28, accepted in 2015-10-09,  发布年份 2015

【 摘 要 】

Background

Understanding how patients move through outpatient clinics is important for optimizing clinic processes. This study compares the costs, benefits, and challenges of two clinically important methods for measuring patient flow: (1) a commercial system using infrared (IR) technology that passively tracks patient movements and (2) a custom-built, low cost, networked radio frequency identification (RFID) system that requires active swiping by patients at proximity card readers.

Methods

Readers for both the IR and RFID systems were installed in the General Eye Service of the Wilmer Eye Institute. Participants were given both IR and RFID tags to measure the time they spent in various clinic stations. Simultaneously, investigators recorded the times at which patients moved between rooms. These measurements were considered the standard against which the other methods were compared.

Results

One hundred twelve patients generated a total of 252 events over the course of 6 days. The proportion of events successfully recorded by the RFID system (83.7 %) was significantly greater than that obtained with the IR system (75.4 %, p < 0.001). The cause of the missing events using the IR method was found to be a signal interruption between the patient tags and the check-in desk receiver. Excluding those data, the IR system successfully recorded 94.4 % of events (p = 0.002; OR = 3.83 compared to the RFID system). There was no statistical difference between the IR, RFID, and manual time measurements (p > 0.05 for all comparisons).

Conclusions

Both RFID and IR methods are effective at providing patient flow information. The custom-made RFID system was as accurate as IR and was installed at about 10 % the cost. Given its significantly lower costs, the RFID option may be an appealing option for smaller clinics with more limited budgets.

【 授权许可】

   
2015 Vakili et al.

【 图 表 】

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