Contextual computing: tracking healthcare providers in the Emergency Department via Bluetooth beacons
Document
Description
Hospital Emergency Departments (EDs) are frequently crowded. The Center for
Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) collects performance measurements from EDs
such as that of the door to clinician time. The door to clinician time is the time at which a
patient is first seen by a clinician. Current methods for documenting the door to clinician
time are in written form and may contain inaccuracies. The goal of this thesis is to
provide a method for automatic and accurate retrieval and documentation of the door to
clinician time. To automatically collect door to clinician times, single board computers
were installed in patient rooms that logged the time whenever they saw a specific
Bluetooth emission from a device that the clinician carried. The Bluetooth signal is used
to calculate the distance of the clinician from the single board computer. The logged time
and distance calculation is then sent to the server where it is determined if the clinician
was in the room seeing the patient at the time logged. The times automatically collected
were compared with the handwritten times recorded by clinicians and have shown that
they are justifiably accurate to the minute.
Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) collects performance measurements from EDs
such as that of the door to clinician time. The door to clinician time is the time at which a
patient is first seen by a clinician. Current methods for documenting the door to clinician
time are in written form and may contain inaccuracies. The goal of this thesis is to
provide a method for automatic and accurate retrieval and documentation of the door to
clinician time. To automatically collect door to clinician times, single board computers
were installed in patient rooms that logged the time whenever they saw a specific
Bluetooth emission from a device that the clinician carried. The Bluetooth signal is used
to calculate the distance of the clinician from the single board computer. The logged time
and distance calculation is then sent to the server where it is determined if the clinician
was in the room seeing the patient at the time logged. The times automatically collected
were compared with the handwritten times recorded by clinicians and have shown that
they are justifiably accurate to the minute.