When the Triemli City Hospital in Zurich renovated its Emergency Center in 2017, one issue managers wanted to address was efficiency. Traditionally, doctors had spent hours running from room to room to see patients — time that could have been spent on medical treatment. As a solution, hospital managers envisioned a new ticketing system that would optimize patient coordination. To bring their vision to reality, they turned to Arbon-based integrator Aerne Solutions.

For the new system, Aerne installed a touchscreen with ticket printer outside the waiting area, which patients use to print out a ticket linked to their medical files. Staff and doctors interact with the system using their PCs, which are connected to a Triemli City server running encrypted software. To call a patient to a treatment room to check vital signs, draw blood, or perform medical treatment, the nurse or doctor simply selects their name on the PC. The patient’s ticket number and corresponding treatment room are then displayed on two information screens in the waiting room, letting them know where to go. With the patient’s medical history linked to the ticket, doctors can quickly prepare the proper treatment.

When the treatment is completed, the ticket is closed in the system. All data is recorded statistically and can be processed via an Excel report. This allows hospital managers to analyze patient wait times and other data to determine how efficiently the Emergency Center is running.

One challenge in developing the ticket system was exchanging information between the server, displays, and printer. To address this issue, Aerne relied on RTI’s XP-3 control processor, creating two-way drivers for the server and the printer. When a doctor or nurse selects a patient to see, the XP-3 relays this information to the screens in the waiting room. If the printer runs out of paper, the XP-3 relays an alert to the server, where it is sent to the PC of the appropriate employee.

“While we typically rely on RTI for automation and control in AV systems, the company’s processors are more than capable of handling unique applications, such as a patient ticket system,” said Pascal Nyffenegger, systems integrator at Aerne Solutions. “The RTI platform allows for complete customization to meet the needs of any project, and as an RTI driver developer I can make virtually any components communicate with each other. The result has been perfect for the Triemli City Hospital. They love their system and we’ve already gotten a request to extend it beyond the Emergency Center.”