System for automatically tallying time spent by medical personnel attending to patients

An apparatus for automatically tallying time spent by health care workers attending to patients, said apparatus comprising:

• a plurality of identification devices one of which being assigned to each patient and each identification devices emitting a first wireless signal that provides an identification of the patient to whom the respective identification device was assigned;
• a plurality of data acquisition devices one of which being assigned to each health care worker for receiving the first wireless signal and containing an identifier of a given health care worker, whenever a first wireless signal is received a given data acquisition device measures an amount of time that such first wireless signal continues to be received and stores data record specifying the identification of the patient and the amount of time;
• and
• at least one data interrogator which obtains from plurality of data acquisition devices the data record stored therein and the identifier of the given health care worker.

A method for automatically tallying time spent by a health care worker attending to a patient, said apparatus comprising:

• the patient carrying an identification device that emits a first wireless signal which provides an identification of the patient;
• the health care worker carrying a data acquisition device that receives the first wireless signal, and measures an amount of time determined from receipt of the first wireless signal;
• and
• obtaining, via a data interrogator, the amount of time and the identification of the patient from the data acquisition device.