Needle-guidance systems, devices, and method thereof including RFID technology

A needle-guidance system, comprising:

• single-patient equipment including a vascular access device (“VAD”) having:
• a needle including a magnet or a magnetizable region about a distal-end portion of the needle configured for magnetically tracking the needle near or in a patient;
• and
• a radiofrequency identification (“RFID”) tag incorporated into the VAD or a packaging for the VAD;
• multi-patient equipment including a console optionally having a number of ports including an RFID-reader port, wherein the console;
• is configured to automatically start needle tracking for a clinician on an integrated display screen of the console after receiving RFID-tag data from the RFID tag, validating compatibility of the VAD with one or more additional medical devices or a particular percutaneous procedure, and processing with a processor of the console instructions of needle-tracking software provided by memory of the console for the needle tracking;
• is configured to simultaneously store in a device database of the console, identifying information for the VAD from the RFID-tag data as well as starting and stopping timestamps for calculating dwell time for the needle of the VAD;
• and
• includes a reporting algorithm configured to report on the integrated display screen a rate of unique VADs used with the console over one or more periods of time from the device database;
• and
• an RFID reader-writer configured to read the RFID-tag data from the RFID tag and write additional RFID-tag data to the RFID tag, the RFID reader-writer provided with the packaging for the VAD or the multi-patient equipment, wherein:
• the RFID-tag data includes needle characteristics of the needle, the needle characteristics selected from magnetic strength of the magnet, geometric length of the magnet, magnetic length of the magnet, and magnetic-alignment parameters of magnetic relating offsets of a magnetic-field axis to a physical axis;
• and
• the additional RFID-tag data includes a timestamp for each date and time the RFID-tag data is read from the RFID tag including a starting timestamp and a stopping timestamp.