Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has renewed its licence for Lyngsoe Systems X-Tracking through to October 2030 and extended the RFID equipment tracking system to St Luke’s Hospital, one of the hospitals it runs in Bradford, West Yorkshire.
The St Luke’s installation adds 40 Zebra Technologies FX9600-4 fixed readers driving 80 antennas. Set against the 132 readers and 274 antennas already installed across Bradford Royal Infirmary and Airedale sites, that takes the network to 172 readers and 354 antennas, covering up to 38,000 medical devices.
What X-Tracking actually does
Lyngsoe Systems is a Danish tracking and logistics technology company headquartered in Aars, North Jutland, with RFID deployments spanning postal and parcel networks, airport baggage handling, libraries and healthcare. X-Tracking is its hospital asset product: passive RFID tags go on to mobile medical equipment, fixed readers watch the doorways, corridors and lift lobbies that equipment has to pass through, and the software turns those reads into a live picture of where each item is, when it was last seen and when it is next due for service.
The reason for putting readers at choke points rather than in every room is that a passive tag has no battery and no way of announcing itself. It only replies when it is inside the field of a reader antenna. Site an antenna pair on a ward entrance and every tagged pump, wheelchair or ventilator that passes through is logged, with no one having to scan anything by hand.
The hardware at St Luke’s
The FX9600-4 is the four-port version of Zebra’s industrial fixed reader. Each of its four monostatic RF ports drives a single antenna, so 40 readers paired with 80 antennas means the trust is running an average of two antennas per reader and leaving two ports free on each. It is a UHF RAIN RFID device built to EPC Gen2 V2, standardised as ISO/IEC 18000-63, and its published specification covers 865-868 MHz for European use and 902-928 MHz for the United States, with maximum receive sensitivity quoted at -86 dBm monostatic.
The readers installed from mid-2021 onwards, when the system first went live, were Impinj units. Both vendors build to the same UHF air interface, so a tag read on a Bradford Royal Infirmary corridor and the same tag read at St Luke’s return the same EPC to the same software. That is what lets a mixed-vendor reader estate behave as one network rather than several.
What the trust reports since mid-2021
Bradford lists real-time, round-the-clock visibility of tagged equipment across its sites, better monitoring of equipment transferred between trusts, preventive maintenance scheduled and compliance evidenced against real location data rather than a paper diary, and faster retrieval of critical devices such as wheelchairs, ventilators and ultrasound machines. It also credits the system with reducing rental costs and charging errors, since usage-based billing only stands up if you can show what was on site and for how long. High-loss non-clinical items have been trialled on the same system, step ladders included.
“Lyngsoe X-Tracking has brought greater visibility and control to how we manage medical equipment across our sites,” said Shivinder Singh, Clinical Engineering Team Leader at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Other NHS organisations have reached the same problem by different routes. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust went with battery-powered active RFID for 846 beds and 1,309 devices, which buys longer range and independent reporting at the cost of batteries to replace. Bradford’s passive UHF approach puts the cost and the maintenance in the reader infrastructure instead, which is why the reader and antenna counts are the number that matters here.
The Scan4Safety thread
Bradford was an early adopter of Scan4Safety, the GBP 12 million Department of Health and Social Care programme launched in 2016 that used GS1 barcodes and RFID to hold hospitals to a “right patient, right product, right place, right process” model of traceability. Its six demonstrator trusts reported recurrent inventory savings of close to GBP 5 million over two years. The equipment tracking Bradford has now committed to through to October 2030 is the asset-management half of that idea, carried on well past the original programme.
More deployments of this kind are collected in our Healthcare coverage, and the terms used above are defined in the RFID glossary.
Read more at https://lyngsoesystems.com/logistics/hospitals/cases/st-lukes-hospital
