These steps may include quarantining staff and patients, providing prophylactic treatments if indicated, sterilizing potentially contaminated equipment, and/or removing patients and staff from quarantine who may have otherwise been included as a precaution. This information enables us to quickly take the necessary steps to first generate an accurate assessment of the exposure risk and then efficiently minimize the spread of disease. The automatically generated contact-tracing report, which leverages data collected by RTLS, allows us to trace infectious disease carriers and quickly see other patients and staff who may have come into proximity with the infected person. The RTLS infrastructure now covers over 4,250,000 square feet of our main campus, including over 8,000 staff members wearing location badges, and nearly all of our patients receive RTLS "CarePass" badges when they come to Wake Forest Baptist's medical facilities. This rapidly established contact-tracing capability enabled us to quickly isolate and monitor interactions between an infected patient and other patients and staff. Our hospital already had an RTLS infrastructure in place that we were using for asset management, patient flow, environmental monitoring and other use cases, so it took us just one week from the concept of using our RTLS system for this purpose to a fully working system. In this situation, many patients and staff may have been exposed to the now known communicable disease during their encounters with the patient in areas such as waiting rooms, exam rooms or labs.īack in 2014, as an immediate response to the Ebola outbreak, our health system Wake Forest Baptist Health implemented and operationalized a real-time location system for contact tracing. This status is only known after a medical evaluation and testing. Hospitals often admit patients without knowing the status of the patients' communicable disease(s).
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