Download Wireless Temperature Monitoring at Louisiana Hospital

Wireless Temperature Monitoring at Louisiana Hospital - Oct. 2011
Challenges
Hospitals are required to adhere to stringent temperature monitoring of freezers and
refrigerators used to store pharmaceuticals, blood, organs, tissues, food and other items.
Regulatory requirements (e.g. FDA, AABB, cGMP) are closely watched by regulatory bodies to
ensure patient safety. Many hospitals today use a manual process of checking and recording
each refrigeration unit on a daily basis, a time consuming and error prone activity.
One of the newest regional medical centers in Louisiana needed to add temperature
monitoring to the nearly 200 stand alone refrigerators for pharmaceutical and food storage
throughout the 6 Floor facility.
The Hospital was virtually completed when the requirement was presented to the system
integrator, meaning the addition of network wiring, input / output modules, not to mention
thousands of feet of sensor wiring would have been costly and disruptive to the move-in of
the hospital staff.
Solution
The system integrator investigated several solutions and turned to Spinwave Systems to
supply them with a wireless temperature monitoring system that could be easily deployed
and integrated with the existing Building Automation System (BAS).
The temperature monitoring system was structured into 6 wireless mesh networks, on per
floor. Each mesh network consists of one Receiver/BACnet IP Gateway and a number of
SWS-T-EXT battery powered remote probe wireless sensors. The remote thermistor probes
were installed inside the refrigerators on all the patient floors on the 3rd through the 6th floor.
The 1st and 2nd floor Networks included sensors for food storage and preparation in freezers
and coolers as well.
All of the temperature sensor data is archived on the existing BAS for monitoring, alarming
and reporting.
Results
The wireless temperature monitoring system was installed without disrupting hospital
operation.
The system easily integrated with the existing Building Automation System, using its inherent
logging, monitoring, alarming and reporting capabilities and avoiding the cost of a separate
isolated solution.
The hospital can easily expand the system to monitor additional freezers and refrigerators.
Spinwave provides additional sensors, capable of monitoring ultra-low temperature freezers
and able to interface to CO2 sensors, pressure sensors, etc.
Automatic record keeping, alarming and reporting makes it easier for the hospital to comply
with regulatory requirements.
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