The Ohio State University Medical Center Leverages Expansive Wi-Fi Network to Track and Manage Medical Equipment, Improve Workflow and Increase Staff and Patient Safety Using Ekahau RTLS

RESTON, Virginia , January 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Ekahau Inc., the performance leader in Wi-Fi-based Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), today announced that The Ohio State University (OSU) Medical Center has selected the Ekahau RTLS solution as the foundation for enabling a wide variety of location tracking applications across its 5 million square foot campus.

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For the past five years, OSU Medical Center has been named one of the country's "Most Wired Hospitals" by Hospital & Health Networks, the journal of the American Hospital Association. Hospitals earn this prestigious designation through the inventive use of wireless and Internet technologies. The decision to deploy Ekahau RTLS for location tracking applications is further evidence of the ways in which OSU Medical Center is an innovation leader, utilizing information technology to achieve greater operational efficiencies, reduce overall costs and improve patient care and safety.

In mid-2009, OSU Medical Center's IT department evaluated a select few Wi-Fi-based RTLS solutions that could leverage the hospital's system-wide, medical-grade Wi-Fi network from Cisco Systems Inc. OSU Medical Center has deployed approximately 3,000 WI-Fi access points and 30 network controllers as part of a mission to unwire their entire campus. Ekahau RTLS was chosen because of its superior location accuracy, ability to monitor location of assets across multiple buildings on campus and at far-flung satellite locations, and the fact it did not require additional investment in proprietary hardware, such as sensors or chokepoints and could yet deliver the accuracy needed to satisfy OSU Medical Center's requirements.

"We chose to leverage a Wi-Fi-based system for a number of reasons: It enables us to get full coverage out of the box; it supports advanced capabilities, such as two-way messaging; and it can provide room-level and sub-room location accuracy where needed," said Chad Neal , Director of Technology at OSU Medical Center. "Ekahau's Wi-Fi-based approach for RTLS gives us the flexibility to deploy tags and services anywhere, anytime without having to incur additional infrastructure costs and determine how to allocate those costs across multiple departments in a large organization, such as ours."

OSU Medical Center will begin the first phase of deploying the Ekahau RTLS system this month, starting with tracking and managing of a thousand key clinical assets, such as compression devices, IV pumps and isolation carts among other things. The hospital then will subsequently deploy additional Ekahau tags on variety of mobile medical equipment, ranging from robotic delivery systems to wheelchairs. Ekahau RTLS also is expected to be used to track the location of patients, to ensure safety and improve care. Two-way communications capabilities inherent in Ekahau RTLS will support staff safety and Wi-Fi-paging applications, as well. Within the next few years, OSU Medical Center estimates that the Ekahau RTLS solution will be used track more than 15,000 items and individuals, delivering efficiencies, improving safety and lowering costs across the entire system.

The Ekahau RTLS solution provides OSU Medical Center with a wide range of information about the location and status of all tracked items and individuals, or events logged on the system. In addition to built-in reporting, Ekahau's XML API provides OSU Medical Center the ability to then perform their own analytics on anything being tracked, in order to evaluate where efficiencies could be gained or procedures improved. The API also enables the hospital to integrate Ekahau's location data into other systems within the hospital.

"The large, widespread OSU Medical Center campus is a perfect place to showcase the strengths of Ekahau RTLS," said Tuomo Rutanen , senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development for Ekahau. "Our Wi-Fi, standards-based solution makes it easy to deploy location tracking applications campuswide within a matter of weeks, and eliminates all the hidden costs and delays related to other systems that require additional hardware to be installed in every room."

About The Ohio State University Medical Center

Located in Columbus, Ohio , The Ohio State University Medical Center is one of the largest and most diverse academic medical centers in the country and the only academic medical center in central Ohio . OSU Medical Center is among only 21 hospitals in the country named to U.S. News & World Report's elite Honor Roll, which demonstrates a hospital's excellence in at least six specialties. This is the 17th consecutive year the magazine has named OSU Medical Center one of "America's Best Hospitals." OSU Medical Center is consistently recognized as one of the nation's top 100 "Most Wired" hospitals, according to Hospitals & Health Networks, the journal of the American Hospital Association and has been awarded the CIO 100 Award by CIO magazine in 2006 and 2008.

About Ekahau Inc.

Ekahau Inc. is the industry leader in providing Wi-Fi-based RTLS solutions. Ekahau's RTLS technology is routinely recognized for its superior performance in customer benchmarking and competitive evaluations of Wi-Fi-based location tracking solutions. Ekahau's customers, including several Fortune 500 companies worldwide, are realizing the benefits of Wi-Fi based location services and innovative Wi-Fi network planning and optimization tools. Ekahau's solutions are being used in more than 150 hospitals around the world, as well as by manufacturers, mining/ oil/gas companies, government agencies and the military. Ekahau partners include wireless software developers, leading system integrators and international OEM partners, who develop and market wireless enterprise applications. Ekahau is a U.S. based corporation, with offices in Saratoga, Calif. ; Reston, Va. ; Helsinki, Finland ; and Hong Kong, China . For more information about Ekahau, please visit at http://www.ekahau.com.

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    U.S. Media Contact:

    Juliet Travis
    Rocket Science PR, for Ekahau
    +1-415-464-8110 x 215
    [email protected]

SOURCE Ekahau Inc.