SYRACUSE, NY – St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center, a non-profit, 431-bed hospital in western New York, has deployed wireless technology to keep tabs on refrigerated healthcare items, such as vaccines, medication and blood bags.

St. Joseph's has refrigerators at its main campus and at 22 remote locations.

The Joint Commission and other hospital monitoring organizations set stringent standards for frequent temperature monitoring of refrigerated materials in hospitals. For nursing, laboratory and pharmacy staff, maintaining these standards has traditionally been a time-consuming manual process, said Chuck

St. Joseph's  Hospital recently freed caregivers from the anual tasks of monitoring nd logging refrigerator emperature ata several imes a day for every refrigeration unit by deploying technology from NEC, headquartered in Irving, Texas, and Redwood, Calif.-based eroScout. AeroScout provided the Wi-Fi tags that monitor the temperature of refrigerated items, while NEC served as systems integrator.

This automated system helps ensure safe temperature ranges and compliance with requirements of The Joint Commission and other regulatory bodies by generating reports on status, trends, alarms and corrective actions taken, said Chuck Fennell, St. Joseph's CIO.

"Automatic monitoring and reporting on asset temperatures has helped us improve compliance and enhanced the ability of our nurses and clinical staff to focus on their most important task  -  providing the best patient care possible," Fennell said.

At St. Joseph's, AeroScout Wi-Fi tags are placed inside refrigerators and freezers containing temperature-sensitive items, such as vaccines, pharmaceuticals, tissues, blood bags, organs and patient test results. The tags wirelessly send temperature readings over the hospital's Cisco Unified Wireless Network to AeroScout's MobileView software. If the temperature exceeds or goes below a set threshold, an alert is triggered and sent to hospital staff.