How RTLS can help to prevent the spreading of diseases such as Covid-19 ?

Context

Major challenges in hospitals, especially during pandemic crises, are related to lack of visibility and traceability of patients and medical equipment. This can lead to diseases spreading to medical personnel as well as other patients in the hospital and more largely to the wider population. In addition, not knowing where critical medical equipment is in the hospital, and if it is being used or not, can lead to time wasted in searching for them, thus, the inability to treat all patients. It can also result in theft, as already seen in France, but also slow down the capacity to treat patients appropriately. These factors can increase death rates related to infections such as Covid-19.

Uses Cases

We identified different uses cases where Real Time Location System can help health professionals in their fight against spreading of diseases. For instance, Ubudu’s solution is able to ensure :

• Reduce close contacts by triggering real-time alerts when distance between infected patient and other people is below 1m in the hospital, or when a certain number of people is detected in a room such as an Emergency Room (ER) waiting area

• Prevent the spreading of the disease in the hospital, by triggering automatic and real-time alerts in case of contaminated patients or equipment goes beyond designated areas

• Closely monitor quarantine from home by triggering real-time alerts when a person under quarantine leaves his home

• Increase medical equipment utilisation rates such as ventilators or beds by tracking their location within and across hospitals, to automatically be able to match demand with available equipment and save time finding the equipment in the hospital

• Ensure contaminated equipment goes into disinfection room by triggering a real-time alert if it doesn’t

• Automatically verify that rooms in the hospital have been cleaned properly before sending a new patient in the room by monitoring in real-time and recording cleaning & disinfection activities done

• Audit precisely the contamination chain using historical position data of the contaminated patients and equipment and those they have been in close contact with

Real-Time Location System (RTLS) can help save lives, in the context of a large-scale pandemic such as Covid-19 we are enduring right now.

Ubudu’s core value stands in its multi-technology system enabling it to locate anything, anywhere at low cost. The solution can be deployed very quickly thanks to Ubudu’s nimble infrastructure based on wireless transmitters. The targeted use cases are vast and all serve the same purpose, saving lives by monitoring more closely patients, personnel and equipment: track critical medical equipment within hospitals and across the supply chain to match demand (masks, ventilators, beds etc.), trigger alerts in case of contaminated patients going beyond designated areas (within hospital or home quarantine), avoid collocation of too many people in the same space and audit the contamination chain using historical position data. The use cases could be extended to help further to ensure social distance is maintained in public venues for instance.

We are ready to help in this crises

We have already deployed since January 2020 our solution in 2 hospitals in France also driven by the expertise that Ubudu’s board members have in healthcare. Our solution for finding pandemics is therefore a continuity of our product offering, and serves those same goals, only at stakes which are much higher : contain viral epidemics such as Covid-19, and thereby save potentially many lives.
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As of today, we are able to make use of our readily available solution to quickly help in this crisis. At the same time, we will continue investing in our solution to adapt our current system to the longer term traceability and monitoring goals of the healthcare sector as we have already started doing for CHRU Brest and Saint Joseph (top 100 hospitals worldwide).

As entrepreneurs with families in the medical sector, it is also an ultimate way to “give back” to society, to help our friends and families, their connections, the connections of their connections, and ultimately as many citizens as we can.

Want to know more, feel free to contact us, we would be glad to help.