System for automatically tallying time spent by medical personnel attending to patients
First Claim
1. An apparatus for automatically tallying time spent by a health care worker attending to a patient, said apparatus comprising:
- an identification device located proximate to the patient and emitting a first wireless signal that provides an identification of the patient;
a data acquisition device to be carried by the health care worker, the data acquisition device receiving the first wireless signal, and measuring an amount of time determined from receipt of the first wireless signal; and
a data interrogator which obtains the amount of time and the identification of the patient from the data acquisition device.
4 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
A monitoring system in a medical facility provides identification devices to patients and a data acquisition device to health care workers. The data acquisition device receives a signal from the identification device which identifies the associated patient and measures an amount of time that the patient is being treated by the health care worker associated with the given data acquisition device. A data interrogator reads data from the data acquisition devices which identify associated health care worker the patients that were treated and the amount of time each treatment. The data read from the data acquisition devices can be used to prepare reports specifying the amount of treatment each patient received and the amount of treatment each health care worker provided.
11 Citations
27 Claims
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1. An apparatus for automatically tallying time spent by a health care worker attending to a patient, said apparatus comprising:
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an identification device located proximate to the patient and emitting a first wireless signal that provides an identification of the patient;
a data acquisition device to be carried by the health care worker, the data acquisition device receiving the first wireless signal, and measuring an amount of time determined from receipt of the first wireless signal; and
a data interrogator which obtains the amount of time and the identification of the patient from the data acquisition device. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)
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12. An apparatus for automatically tallying time spent by health care workers attending to patients, said apparatus comprising:
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a plurality of identification devices one of which being assigned to each patient and each identification devices emitting a first wireless signal that provides an identification of the patient to whom the respective identification device was assigned;
a plurality of data acquisition devices one of which being assigned to each health care worker for receiving the first wireless signal and containing an identifier of a given health care worker, whenever a first wireless signal is received a given data acquisition device measures an amount of time that such first wireless signal continues to be received and stores data record specifying the identification of the patient and the amount of time; and
at least one data interrogator which obtains from plurality of data acquisition devices the data record stored therein and the identifier of the given health care worker. - View Dependent Claims (13, 14, 15, 16, 17)
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18. A method for automatically tallying time spent by a health care worker attending to a patient, said apparatus comprising:
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the patient carrying an identification device that emits a first wireless signal which provides an identification of the patient;
the health care worker carrying a data acquisition device that receives the first wireless signal, and measures an amount of time determined from receipt of the first wireless signal; and
obtaining, via a data interrogator, the amount of time and the identification of the patient from the data acquisition device. - View Dependent Claims (19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27)
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Specification