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Radio frequency system tracks bed availability and patient location in real time
 IF AN emergency room doctor at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) decides a patient needs to be
hospitalised today, he will wait, on average, just two hours for a bed.
The hospital has implemented a bed management system (BMS) that uses radio frequency to help cut waiting time, which can be as long as eight to 10 hours for some patients.
The $3 million technology from the United States uses colour codes, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for patients, and readers to cue hospital staff with real-time information on patient location, room status, and hospital bed occupancy.
The system was implemented in the middle of last year as a pilot project. It was the world’s first fully integrated system, and the project was also the world’s largest bed management implementation and the biggest RFID deployment for patient location tracking.
SGH’s chief executive, Professor Ang Chong Lye, said that with the system, patients could be assigned to beds in the right specialty ward, so they receive the right care.
He said: “For example, stroke patients need to have certain protocols in place, therefore the system can help assign a bed in the ward that best fits the patient’s clinical needs and specialist doctors need not walk from one ward to another treating their patients.”
He added that with the new system, half the patients last week were admitted after waiting an average of two hours at the emergency department.
Previously, staff would call to check on ward status and ascertain if there were any beds available. This sometimes extended emergency room waiting times to as long as 10 hours.
Associate Professor Lim Swee Hia, director of nursing at SGH, said: “The constant checking on the phone took up a lot of the nurses’ time. And should they be busy in the ward, often beds are left empty or unmade, and patients are left waiting.”
Now, instead of relying on the telephone, all wards, the emergency department and management offices at SGH are equipped with LCD screens to display bed availability and location of patients in real time.
But not all the beds in the 1,500-bed hospital can be assigned. Between 200 and 300 beds in the intensive care, paediatric and high dependency wards are not included in the system as they have to be kept free for emergencies.
When a patient is admitted, he receives an RFID tag which he wears on his wrist throughout his stay at the hospital. The system searches for and assigns a bed that best fits his disease or condition.
Colours are used to show the status of beds in the ward – green for available, brown for just vacated, yellow for currently being cleaned and pink or blue for occupied.
Prof Lim said: “Housekeepers are also given mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDA) so they would know where to go should a patient be discharged and a bed has to be readied for the next patient.”
This has help cut the turnaround time of beds from 90 minutes to 50 minutes.
The hospital bed crunch that Singapore faced in the past couple of years was so bad that non-urgent surgeries were delayed, beds were placed along corridors, and some patients were left waiting for hours for an available bed.
With the opening of the Khoo Teck Puat Hospital in July, the bed crunch at other public hospitals has eased.
Still, the bed management system has been a boon for patients at SGH.
One who was fast-tracked because of it was Ms Wong Weng Ling, 40. She was suffering from nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea and went to the emergency department at 11pm on Monday night.
“When the doctor decided at 2am I needed to be hospitalised, everything started rolling and I was in the ward by around 4am,” she said.
Hospitals such as the National University Hospital (NUH) and Changi General Hospital (CGH) also have in place their own bed management systems. NUH rolled out its Autotrigger Dashboard system two years ago to allow staff to view the bed status, and its housekeepers to receive a notification on their PDAs to clean recently vacated beds.
CGH has had an integrated Web-based BMS since 2005 that displays all available beds in real time for all the wards.
Neither of the two systems is RFID-based, and the hospitals would not say if they would switch to an RFID system.
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