VA gears up to buy world's largest WiFi-based location system

The Veterans Affairs Department has edged closer in the past month to launching a procurement for what industry sources view as the largest WiFi-based real time location system in the world. It would track assets, patients and staff in VA hospitals.

The VA has WiFi networks installed in all 152 of its hospitals to support mobile computing applications. Last month Roger Baker, the department's chief information officer, said at a media briefing last month that he wants to piggyback on that infrastructure for development of the location system.

A number of vendors have developed WiFi-based systems that use tags operating in the WiFi frequency spectrum and sophisticated algorithms to track assets down to the room and even shelf level.

The VA, in a draft request for proposals released Sept. 2 said it also wants to use the location system as the basis for a national data repository to provide total asset visibility throughout the hospital system and eventually the Veterans Benefits Administration and the National Cemetery Administration, too.

VA kicked off the location system project last December with a broad request for information, followed by the September draft RFP, which Joel Cook, director of health care solutions at AeroScout , a WiFi location system vendor, described as a more focused approach on the VA's core health care mission.

The VA last Friday announced it would hold an industry conference in Austin, Texas, focused on what it described as a "critical need " for an enterprise-wide location system. Cook said he expected to see a final RFP released by the end of the year.

VA currently tracks hospital assets, ranging from computers to medical equipment, with bar code tags, but the draft RFP said these tags need to be scanned manually. A WiFi-based tagging system would automate the process.

Cook said WiFi tags also could be used to track the flow of patients and clinical staff into and out of emergency rooms and operating rooms.

Tuomo Rutanen of Ekahau, another WiF-based location vendor, said his company tracks the tags based on their signal strength and then uses an algorithm to locate assets within rooms. Location can be fine-tuned with infrared sensors. In its draft RFP, VA said the WiFi based system would be augmented with other technologies, including infrared and passive radio frequency identification tags.

Rutanen said that depending on the scope of the final RFP, the value of the location system could range from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars.