1.0 BACKGROUND
The mission of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is to provide benefits and services to Veterans of the United States. In meeting these goals, VHA strives to provide high quality, effective, and efficient Information Technology (IT) services to those responsible for providing care to the Veterans at the point-of-care as well as throughout all the points of the Veterans’ health care in an effective, timely and compassionate manner. Real Time Location System (RTLS) technology combines a variety of signaling and wireless communication methods to determine the location of tagged assets to speed up annual inventory, locate equipment, reduce theft/loss, and improve clinical workflow. VA depends on Information Management/Information Technology (IM/IT) systems to meet mission goals.
1.1 VISN 21 REAL TIME LOCATING TECHNOLOGY
VISN 21 currently uses CenTrak® proprietary active radiofrequency identification (active RFID) hardware and software to provide real time information of asset location, staff locations, and patient locations. CenTrak® Active Asset Tracking (AT) deployed at VA Medical Centers is supplemented with the Infor® Location-Based Intelligence (LBI) user interface (UI): a platform that maps location data to provide end users with 1) a real-time graphical user interface (GUI) displaying location status for individual assets and 2) a set business intelligence reports and dashboards. These hardware and software are designed for locating assets in real time at a zonal, room-level, and within-room level accuracy.
