Designing and validating a low-cost real time locating system to continuously assess patient wait times.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Outpatient clinics lack infrastructure to easily measure and understand patient wait times. Our objective was to design a low-cost, portable passive real time locating system within an outpatient clinic setting to measure patient wait times and patient-provider interactions.

Materials and methods

Direct observation was used to determine workflow in an outpatient glaucoma clinic at the University of Michigan. We used off-the shelf, antenna-integrated ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID readers (ThingMagic, Astra-Ex, Woburn, MA) and UHF re-useable passive RFID tags (Zebra Impinj Monza 4QT, Seattle, WA). We designed a custom RFID management application in the Java programming language that was equipped with 'live' device administration to collect time and location data fr

SUBMITTER: Newman-Casey PA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7324007 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature