BANGOR, ME – Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, Maine, has deployed real-time patient flow and patient volume management solutions in order to support a increase in scheduled and walk-in patient visits.

The newly renovated EMMC CancerCare of Maine clinic, a 32,000-square-foot facility in neighboring Brewer, provides care services to outpatients that include CT scans, MRIs, digital mammography, diagnostic cardiology, radiography and ultrasound. With these new services, EMMC officials expect to see an increase in the already high volume of patient visits to the clinic.

In response to this expected increase, the hospital has deployed a Real-Time Location System (RTLS) solution to help administrators and physicians manage patient flow. EMMC officials said the RTLS solution, developed by Traverse City, Mich.-based Versus Technology, was deployed to help manage patient flow in light of a 26 percent increase in patient visits between 2006 and 2007.

The RTLS solution is designed to:

* Enable clinic staff to make real-time comparisons to benchmarked goals (modality trending);
* Allow clinic staff to perform more accurate scheduling based on actual time to complete certain procedures;
* Better inform patients as to expected wait and procedure times; and
* Provide physicians and facility staff with the ability to easily analyze patient throughput.

In addition, EMMC officials said, clinic staff will be able to improve efficiency with a new real-time bed management solution, which identifies whether a room is in being cleaned, reserved or unavailable because of patient occupation.

The clinic opened on Sept. 1 and is seeing close to 200 patients per day.