Patent ID: 8114063

Claim:
Method of tracking indwelling catheter use in hospital patients, in which designated health care practitioners are responsible for inserting catheters in said hospital patients, and in which a plurality of machine-readable tags are placed upon respective ones of said hospital patients, and on a plurality of catheters, each said tag having a unique identification code, and wherein a computerized hospital information system contains patient demographic information including identity of each patient and room location of each patient, the method comprising: scanning the patient tag for one of said patients on a portable scanner appliance; selecting one of said catheters for insertion in the patient; scanning the tag of the selected one of the catheters with said scanner appliance to commence a catheterization sequence in which the scanner appliance electronically associates the selected one of the catheters with said patient; and after scanning the tag thereof, the designated health care practitioner inserting said catheter in the patient; the scanner appliance uploading to said hospital information system the catheterization data to include identity location of each such patient, and date/time stamp of the insertion of each said catheter in said patients; the method then comprising the step of computing for said patient, in the hospital information system, a catheter target removal time; storing catheterization data for each said patient including at least the presence of the catheter in said patient, the date stamp of the time of insertion thereof; and said hospital information system being suitably programmed for automatically computing the catheter target removal time for each said patient and generating alerts when a target removal time has been reached for any said patient; and presenting said alerts to the designated healthcare practitioner identifying each patient for whom the associated target removal time has been reached; and comprising uploading current catheterization status from said hand held scanner appliance to a central hospital network associated with said hospital information system, and downloading catheterization status, including said alerts, for said hospital patients from said central hospital network to one or more computer screens available to said designated healthcare practitioners.