Contextual computing: tracking healthcare providers in the Emergency Department via Bluetooth beacons

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.