Critical Care Resources in Surge Response: Towards Real-Time Situation Awareness
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Informa UK Limited
Abstract
In large-scale emergencies and disasters, real-time situation awareness around health resources can be lifesaving. Understanding the situation at hand, the pressing needs and the actions needed often using information systems that require manual data entry. Relying on humans to enter data manually during surge response is both error-prone and an impediment to the critical requirement of real-time situation awareness. This paper explores the potential of Ultra-High Frequency Radio Frequency Identification (UHF RFID) technology to automate the process of manual data entry followed in providing situation awareness related to critical care resources during surge response. Using design science, an RFID-based prototype was developed to identify and track intensive care resources in real-time. The system was tested in a simulated hospital ward environment to understand deployment challenges and a dashboard was developed to reflect real-time data from multiple sources simultaneously. When properly deployed, UHF RFID can be a viable approach to automating critical care reporting during surge response. Automating routine processes can enhance data quality and minimise workload on health professionals leading to better patient care and evidence based decision-making.Description
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Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, ISSN: 0303-6758 (Print); 1175-8899 (Online), Informa UK Limited, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), 1-19. doi: 10.1080/03036758.2024.2403451
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© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.