Wireless Wearable Electronic Tags for Patient Triage

Reference#: P02272

For years, emergency medical response teams have relied on paper triage tags, clipboards of notes, and voice communications (using telephones and hand-held radios) to share patient information. This workflow, however, has proven labor intensive, time consuming and prone to human error. With the start of the twenty-first century, there has been an increasing concern about hospitals around the nation and their ability to handle incoming surges of patients. The inadequate tools, growing patient population, and staffing shortages, are some of the main causes.

Researchers at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory have developed an electronic triage system that facilitates collaborative and time-critical patient care in multiple levels of the medical response community. APL's triage system accomplishes this through the following technologies: - Electronic triage tags, herein referred to as e-tags, with vital sign and location tracking capabilities. - Mobile stations supporting vital sign monitoring, location tracking, triage verification of victims at mass casualty sites. - Web portals and handheld devices facilitating real-time information exchange among distributed emergency response teams such as Emergency Departments, Incident Command Posts, and Public Health Departments. - Service oriented architecture to enable data communication between disparate software systems.

*JHU/APL is seeking an exclusive licensee and development partner for this technology.