RFiD Discovery, a location tracking specialist for healthcare, and Althea, a provider of integrated healthcare technology management, are joining forces to provide location tracking solutions to UK hospitals. The new partnership is due to be officially announced at the EBME Expo in Milton Keynes at the end of June.
Under the agreement, Althea will be using the RFiD Discovery system, which is already tracking hundreds of thousands of assets in over 100 hospitals in the UK and beyond, to add value to their outsourced managed services and multivendor maintenance of medical equipment. In addition, Althea is becoming a reseller of the RFiD Discovery system.
By offering location tracking as a solution or as an added service to existing and new clients, Althea aims to enable healthcare providers to increase efficiency, improve device utilisation and cut costs by reducing the need to purchase new devices.
This partnership provides both companies with the opportunity to further strengthen their respective market leading positions. For RFiD Discovery it also constitutes an important milestone in its long-term strategy to build a strong global network of reseller partners and accelerate bringing an ever-growing portfolio of tracking solutions to the healthcare and other sectors.
As a first step Althea is already adopting the use of the passive RFiD Discovery tracking system for one of their clients, a large healthcare organisation in the UK, to improve their service provision and bring added value to clinical teams in several hospitals.
To do this, medical devices and other assets are fitted with an RFID tag which includes a unique ID number registered in a central database. The presence of tagged devices is detected by handheld or specially designed trolley readers, which send the location information to the database, where clinical and engineering staff can access it to locate devices quickly, saving valuable time and allowing them to focus on core tasks of patient care and device maintenance.
Arron Duddin, global sales and business development at RFiD Discovery, said: “We are delighted to team up with Althea, who are an extremely well-respected leader in their field. Our goals of helping healthcare providers improve processes and ultimately create better patient outcomes are perfectly aligned, and we are excited about our first joint medical device tracking implementations which are already well underway.”
Jason Long, business development director UK and Ireland at Althea, added: “With this agreement Althea are very pleased to be able to bring RFiD Discovery asset tagging and tracking technology to our wide range of customers. Althea will help customers reach higher patient safety and compliance standards by ensuring all tagged medical devices are serviced and compliant to MHRA standards. By providing RFID as a service Althea is helping customers overcome the initial capital outlay that can be a barrier to some organisations.”
