You are an over-worked nurse near the end of your shift at a busy NHS hospital. Over the long day, you have trailed through countless wards, sat by countless beds, felt hundreds of pulses and fought through piles of paperwork.

By the close of play all the cases and case notes have started to merge into one. You come to your last patient and his papers look incomplete.

Suddenly you are not sure who he is or how to treat him. Is he in for a routine scan, or do you need to prepare him for major surgery?

It was exactly that sort of situation that David Morgan was determined to avoid when he started looking at some of the management systems in place at Birmingham's Heartlands hospital earlier this year. The consultant surgeon soon realised that there were serious flaws in the institution's paper-based system for keeping track of patients – flaws that could easily lead to life-threatening mistakes in the wards and operating theatres.

He soon came up with a simple solution based on a relatively simple piece of wireless technology. Late last month, Heartlands became the first hospital to tag its patients and monitor their movements through a Wi-Fi wireless network.

It might not be the most obvious use of the technology – Wi-Fi systems are usually marketed as communication hubs for sharp-suited businessmen, equipped with the latest laptops and PDA/phone combinations. But it works.

Patients are tagged and digitally photographed as they arrive in hospital for surgery. The tag sends out a unique radio signal for each patient which synchronises with a central database carrying all their records. All the doctor or nurse has to do is to scan the tag to get an accurate ID of the patient and an up to date record of their treatment.

"Operation lists can change up to three times a day and each time a list is changed there is a chance that paperwork is not updated correctly, so surgeons can go into theatre with the wrong documents," Mr Morgan explained after the scheme was announced to the local media.

"Patients want reassurance both that the operation will go well and that everything possible is being done to protect their safety. Everyone who has tried the system has welcomed it too."

The key to the success of Heartland's wireless implementation was that it was based on a comprehensive study of Heartlands' existing systems. Mr Morgan saw a flaw - something that could be tightened up – then went on to discover that a wireless solution would be the best way to solve the problem.

That may seem like a fairly obvious process-driven way of making technological decisions. But it is one that many businesses have still to learn when it comes to implementing wireless technology.

According to a study from research group IDC it is certainly one lesson that the European manufacturing industry could do with taking in. When IDC surveyed the sector, they found very few imaginative uses of wireless technology to rival Heartlands and its tagged patients.

Instead, where they found wireless implementations at all, it was limited to the technology's traditional area of simple worker-to-worker communication. WLANS and Wi-Fi systems were installed just as an enhancement of existing wired communication systems.

"The majority of manufacturing organisations use only basic mobility functions such as accessing e-mails and, to a lesser extent, agenda scheduling and corporate directories," said the report last month. Only a handful of "more advanced" organisations had considered going one step further to work out how they could really get the most out of their wireless networks.

"The more progressive manufacturers have begun mobilising strategic applications such as customer relationship management, sales force automation, and inventory management as they seek to increase worker productivity and strengthen their competitive positioning," said Jennifer Thomson, IDC's programme manager for European Vertical Markets.

It is a similar picture in other sectors – with a scattering of honorable exceptions.

One man who can think of a few good examples is Ian Upton, the director of wireless enterprise solutions, LogicaCMG. Think about how energy and utility companies are equipping their field engineers and maintenance employees, in order to increase productivity," he said.

"Another area is the transportation and industry market where wireless enterprise solutions speed up logistic flows using (RFID-based) tracking and tracing and mobile asset management solutions... After several years of experimentation and trials (and related disappointments) we now see larger enterprises starting to move into large scale implementations."

On top of that there are a number of road toll trials running in the UK that use wireless technology to track and charge passing lorries. The list goes on.

A number of companies in the banking and transportation industry have slowly started experimenting with a number of new services including mobile ticketing, payments and multi-channel management. And then there are them patients of Heartlands Hospital all waiting for their operations with their WiFi tags quietly pulsing away.

All that from a technology that most people use just to send e-mail.