Photo: Special Arrangement

HEART AND BRAIN: The cardiac laboratory at the BMJ Heart Centre in Bangalore (left) is linked to the Clinical Information Processing Platform developed by Aventyn.

BANGALORE: When patients are admitted to the Out Patient Department of the Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain (BMJ) Heart Centre here, they are provided a special card fitted with a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip.

This helps the hospital keep track of the patient, via radio, as they move from reception to consultation and treatment rooms. The record of tests conducted, medicines prescribed, bills raised... are all available wirelessly in an instant at any of over a dozen stations, helping the hospital treat the patient, speedily and with minimum hassle.

The RFID technology — the use of tiny embedded radio transmitters to track people and objects — forms the communication backbone of the Clinical Information Processing Platform (CLIP) deployed at BMJ, a state-of-the-art hospital management system that has been developed by an Indian-founded, U.S.-based company, Aventyn.

The latest — version 1.2 — of CLIP, is one of the first of its kind in the healthcare industry, providing clinicians, health care providers and hospital administrators, with a single but comprehensive tool that links up "live" with the key element of any such operation: the patient.

The RFID is increasingly being harnessed to keep track of large inventories in warehouses and depots — but new and creative applications are enlarging its scope.

At BMJ for example, they tag not just patients but high value inventory such as pacemakers and stents as well.

In a special report on the CLIP deployment at the Bangalore hospital, Beth Bacheldor wrote in RFID Journal last week that over 100 patients were being tagged daily.

Satish Chandra, Director of non-invasive cardiology, is quoted as saying that the hospital's experience has encouraged it to extend the system to inpatient and intensive care departments.

The San Diego-based Aventyn was founded by Navin Govind, who has contributed key wireless technologies earlier at Intel and Tarari Inc.

In recent weeks, the CLIP solution has been widely discussed by RFID forums worldwide — and the experience in Bangalore will be closely watched by other potential user agencies worldwide.

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