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Background: Hospitals need to accurately manage mobile devices (e.g., intravenous pumps) associated to their patients and health providers to ensure patient safety. Some hospitals have already invested substantially in real-time location system (RTLS) technology, a specific type of Internet of Things (IoT) application for indoor positioning, to manage mobile clinical devices. Objective: This paper investigates the reuse of RTLS systems to monitor patients and their assigned devices and to manage their connectivity automatically, in real time. Method: A system called Real-time Patient-Device Association and Disassociation (RPDAD) is designed, implemented, and tested in a hospital room and in a university laboratory. Results: RPDAD helps manage patient-device associations through a tablet application, with accurate suggestions for closest devices and automated detection of unexpected disassociations, resulting in real-time alerts. Conclusion: RPDAD offers a usable means of managing associations that does not depend on bar-coding technologies. It also helps amortize investments in RTLS.

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Electronic associations between a medical device, a patient, and a care provider (e.g., a nurse) are new problems in hospitals. As today's devices transmit data to electronic health records, correct associations are necessary. Moreover, the unknown location of required mobile devices (e.g., cardiac monitors) represents additional issues such as unnecessary search effort, delays, and equipment underuse. To mitigate such issues, a patient-device connectivity management system that monitors and tracks patients and their assigned devices becomes an interesting option. Popular approaches for managing associations often involve bar-coding systems, which still require scanning time and which do not solve equipment location issues. This paper proposes a new system that exploits existing Real-Time Location System (RTLS) technology to track patients and devices and support simpler association by a nurse, until disassociation (intended or not) happens, at which point the nurse is notified. The system interacts with nurses through their mobile device (e.g., a tablet). A prototype version of this system was developed as a proof of concept, with correct behaviour. We expect this system to help avoid the above issues while increasing patient care quality and efficiency.

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