Canadian real-time locating systems specialist reduces baby snatching, patient wandering, and staff duress by embedding MySQL 8.0 in its AllGuard platform.
Introduction & Background
GuardRFID is an expert in real-time locating systems, driving security applications in healthcare environments. The privately held Canadian company leverages technology to help organizations obtain real-time visibility of patients, staff, and equipment.
Business Challenges & Goals
There are many alarming hazards in healthcare environments. Newborn babies are snatched from maternity wards, often by women posing as nurses. Accidental mix-ups between baby and mother for breast feeding can result in anxiety and stress for parents and staff duress caused by violence against nurses and other hospital personnel. Then there is a wandering patient, for example one suffering from Alzheimer’s, unknowingly walking right out of hospital doors.
Since 2007, GuardRFID has been equipping healthcare facilities with tagging systems that set off alerts, close and lock doors, summon assistance, strengthen wandering patient safety, as well as provide staff protection and infant security. The company’s real-time location platform AllGuard helps organizations identify, locate, and protect people as well as high-value assets.
Customers benefit from the embedded MySQL database for reporting, data analysis, and compliance. After several years of using MySQL Community Edition, the real-time location specialist migrated to MySQL Enterprise Edition 8.0 to provide richer functionality, security, and higher availability.
Business Results & Metrics
By embedding the high-performance and scalable MySQL Enterprise Edition 8.0 in its people and asset tracking application, GuardRFID has given healthcare and industrial organizations the means to locate and protect newborns, patients, staff, or equipment, increasing business security and reducing hassle.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tagging of people and equipment provides customers with 360-degrees visibility of their assets in real time—with historic activity data stored in MySQL Enterprise Edition 8.0 for reporting, auditing, and regulatory compliance.
GuardRFID’s customers obtain business intelligence by running reports which extract data from the MySQL data warehouse using Java Database Connectivity (JDBC).
AllGuard users in healthcare and other industries—including offshore oil rigs, semi-conductor fabrication plants, or electrical substations—have full access to activity reports through the AllGuard user interface, enabling them to understand the movement of people and assets for the purposes of analysis, planning, and fine-tuning of their security processes.
GuardRFID’s hundreds of customers in North America and across the globe benefit by not having to install their own databases, feeling comfortable to entrust their data to the secure MySQL Enterprise Edition database that uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) as the authenticated link enabling data to travel over the wire in an encrypted format.
MySQL Backup and Recovery guarantees fast systems restore in case of unscheduled downtime, by instantly copying the database and spinning the server back up again.
AllGuard users enjoy a real-time location system ranked high in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for asset tracking to have the smallest, most durable tags, highest accuracy, and most powerful database engine.
Why MySQL Enterprise Edition
Upon inception in 2007, GuardRFID chose the open source MySQL database for their AllGuard RTLS application. In 2011 the company entered into a distribution agreement with Oracle to include MySQL with their AllGuard software distribution. This allows GuardRFID to focus on developing the business applications that they excel in.
MySQL Enterprise Edition 8.0 also enables the company to easily update to newer versions of the database for improved performance and security patches.
“The MySQL database drives our solution and the development tools, bug fixes, and updates. Those are important aspects of what you get from Oracle to help us consistently improve our technology platform,” said Marek Dutkiewicz.