I’m not always a great fan of white papers as I often find them manipulative point of view wise, but I think this piece (except for a couple of paragraphs at the end) gives a very impartial read on the whys and hows of RTLS/RFID in healthcare. While it details eloquently the short-comings of WiFi and zonal “good enough” approaches, it more importantly couches them properly against the larger more practical business cases for RTLS in healthcare. David’s piece is less a condemnation of WiFi, and more of a call to making this about business not technology.

Hoglund developed this whitepaper for AwarePoint (whose RTLS technology uses ZigBee), but the conclusions could have just as easily pointed to Sonitor (Ultrasound), or Centrak (IR/RF).

The good news is that customers have some solid choices in powering the critical applications that are so desperately needed to help improve healthcare business performance.