Contextual Computing: Tracking Healthcare Providers in the Emergency Department via Bluetooth Beacons

• Other Authors: Frisby, Joshua (Author)
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: Computer science; Bioinformatics; Bluetooth; Computing; Contextual; Emergency; Healthcare
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.34786

abstract: Hospital Emergency Departments (EDs) are frequently crowded. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) collects performance measurements from EDs such as that of the door to clinician time. The door to clinician time is the time at which a patient is first seen by a clinician. Current methods for documenting the door to clinician time are in written form and may contain inaccuracies. The goal of this thesis is to provide a method for automatic and accurate retrieval and documentation of the door to clinician time. To automatically collect door to clinician times, single board computers were installed in patient rooms that logged the time whenever they saw a specific Bluetooth emission from a device that the clinician carried. The Bluetooth signal is used to calculate the distance of the clinician from the single board computer. The logged time and distance calculation is then sent to the server where it is determined if the clinician was in the room seeing the patient at the time logged. The times automatically collected were compared with the handwritten times recorded by clinicians and have shown that they are justifiably accurate to the minute. === Dissertation/Thesis === Masters Thesis Computer Science 2015