CNHI News Service Health watch

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Manuel Lowenhaupt, president and CEO of Radianse Inc., talks about the company’s RFID product while sitting in his office. In the foreground sits a Radianse “reader,” dozens of which can be placed on hospital walls to pick up the signals from radio frequency identification tags that monitor patients, staff and equipment. Angie Beaulieu/Eagle-Tribune

Editor's notes: Radianse.jpg
w/ Keeping track, Retail taggoing adds efficiency -and concern

“Nurses spend a lot of time hunting and gathering. This gives them back time. It’s also safer and more efficient.”
Manuel Lowenhaupt, Radianse CEO

ANDOVER , Mass. — Sometimes, Manuel Lowenhaupt must feel like he’s on top of the world.
That’s because, sometimes, he is.
In June, the Andover resident was tapped by the Radianse board of directors to be the new president and chief executive officer for the company that sells Radio-Frequency Identification technology to hospitals to track patients, staff and equipment.
And while Lowenhaupt, a lanky, soft-spoken physician-businessman, embraces his new position in the hot industry of product and human tracking devices, his work is not his first love.
“My passion is climbing,” said Lowenhaupt, cradling an ice ax he keeps on the wall behind his desk — right under the faded Tibetan prayer flags that normally flutter in the high altitudes of the Himalayas.
“But I only do ice and snow,” he added.
Above the tree line, all the cares in the world disappear, he said, because “you are totally focused on not falling.”
At Radianse, his focus is on something else: doubling the size of the 35-person company over the next year. “We are looking for explosive growth,” he said. “We are not just hoping and wishing, however. Hope is not a sales strategy.”
That is one of many pithy phrases the MIT-educated, Harvard Medical School graduate uses during a nearly two-hour interview in his company’s pristine, third-floor Brickstone Square offices in the sprawling campus off Route 133.
The sales strategy is pretty straightforward: There are 5,000 hospitals in the United States, and 2,000 to 3,000 of them are big enough to need the technology solutions sold by Radianse.
“That’s 2,000 to 3,000 customers,” he said, noting that capturing just 20 percent of that market would still be a significant accomplishment.
Currently, Radianse has sold its system — which consists of RFID tags, RFID readers and what he called “middleware,” or software needed to manage the information and display it on 42-inch plasma screens at hospital nurses’ stations — to some 60 hospitals around the country.
The privately financed company, founded in 2000 by a couple of former employees of the Hewlett-Packard medical systems group, now Philips Medical Systems in Andover, is built around a concept that is fairly simple, but which has remarkable results.
Small tags containing RFID chips and antennae are placed on patients when they enter the hospital. Readers mounted on the walls throughout the hospital pick up the unique signals emitted by each tag. That information is fed into a computer system via a wireless network, and funneled through the middleware. The information then is displayed on plasma screens, where the old, erasable white boards once hung near nurses’ stations or some other central location.
The plasma screen actually depicts a map of the building, highlighting specific floors and showing rooms, corridors, stairways and other details. And the image can be manipulated, for instance, with a zoom function so staff can take a closer look.
The code emitted by the RFID tag not only shows where patients are, but also who they are, when they were admitted and other salient details, including age, sex and the reason they are in the hospital.
Lowenhaupt said one medical study showed that 20 percent of physical therapists’ time is spent “looking for patients.” With this technology, he said, “anyone can view any one floor at any one time” and find the person they are looking for.
“It’s like an air traffic control radar system,” he said. Instead of tracking planes, however, hospital workers are tracking people.
The system has other functions, too, like tracking medical equipment. If someone on staff needs a defibrillator, Lowenhaupt said, he or she can just glance at the screen to find one.
“Nurses spend a lot of time hunting and gathering,” he said. “This gives them back time. It’s also safer and more efficient.”
It doesn’t stop there.
In some hospitals, tags also are placed on nurses, doctors and custodial staff for even more efficiency.
For example, if a patient has a condition that requires he or she be seen within 45 minutes, a timer can be set for patient and doctor. If the time approaches and the doctor still hasn’t seen the patient, the doctor is called by cell phone or beeper.
The software is so sophisticated it even can tell if the doctor actually treats the patient.
“You need to stay there for a while,” Lowenhaupt said. “If the doctor just walks by the patient, that doesn’t count.”
In addition, the system can be used to determine if a room is in use and if it’s clean. In some hospitals, this function has been shown to reduce bed turnover from 60 minutes to 35 minutes, Lowenhaupt said, helping hospitals to “create more beds” without building a new addition.
But with the technology comes privacy concerns, Lowenhaupt concedes.
In a California hospital, he said, where the nursing staff is heavily unionized, 97 percent of the nurses carried the tags. But to convince the staff to do so, Radianse and hospital administrators had to assure them that the readers would not be placed in break or rest rooms, and the tags were “de-identified.”
“We don’t know which nurse you are,” he said.
Katherine Albrecht of Nashua, N.H., co-author of “Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID,” said she has spoken with many people who are opposed to being tracked where they work.
“I’ve been contacted by medical personnel who don’t like the tags,” she said. “They don’t want to be tracked; they’re not inventory.”
Lowenhaupt, however, said the company is “obsessive about privacy” and that the software used to track patients does not reveal medical information that would violate state or federal laws.
“There’s lots of security,” he said.

Bill Kirk writes for The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, Mass.