The Kantonsspital Baden (KSB) in Switzerland, a public hospital in Baden in the Swiss canton of Aargau, is in the process of deploying 2,000 IoT tags and 7,000 IoT sensors to improve its patient care, hospital operations, and energy consumption. The hospital has worked with Siemens on the project. The smart tags, offering real-time location (tracking) services (RTLS), are being attached to hospital beds, wheelchairs, and other “crucial” medical equipment; the sensors are being used, presumably (the press statement is not clear), variously to run diagnostics on the health of patients and equipment, and for room occupancy and environmental monitoring.
KSB is using elements of Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio – from Siemens and partners; combined as a “smart hospital platform” – to create a “demand-driven, customised IoT platform”, and to make it into “one of the country’s smartest hospitals”. The German firm’s ‘smart infrastructure’ unit has curated the solution. Data streams from a new KSB building in Baden will be combined in the platform. The new building is to open in early 2025. Siemens said: “[The platform] enables development, setup, and scaling of additional use cases.” It is also to install a navigation system for a newly developed hospital app to help patients and staff find treatment rooms and other locations on the campus.
“This will reduce wait times and increase the hospital’s treatment capacity,” it said. It quoted Frost & Sullivan that staff spend 72 minutes on average per shift searching for equipment. It stated: “RTLS and a dedicated application ensure transparency and make it easy for staff to locate these items, while increasing productivity. Ultimately, the solution ensures a positive effect on the speed and quality of patient care.” KSB has access to Siemens’ building technology portfolio, including the Desigo CC building management system, Desigo room automation, fire safety solutions, and automation of primary systems. Siemens said the planning process was managed efficiently through use of building information modelling (BIM).
Adrian Schmitter, chief executive at Kantonsspital Baden, said: “Siemens and KSB are working together to drive the digital transformation of hospitals in order to create the best possible conditions for patient recovery and the ideal working environment for our employees.”
Janina Beilner, senior vice president of healthcare at Siemens Smart Infrastructure, said: “The healthcare sector presents a number of interesting opportunities for digitalization… Our approach, developed in close cooperation with customers, uses digital tools and services to build an IoT platform in which solutions to specific challenges can be tailored, added, and scaled as they arise. It is the perfect example of our Siemens Xcelerator ecosystem at work.”
