From the April 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
PinnacleHealth’s RTLS system also enables the scheduling of additional surgeries per day by making each step of the surgical process more efficient. And the technology is also providing the health system with analytics. “You can measure any kind of milestone that you want as far as: Nurse A takes this amount of time to process patients, Nurse B takes this amount of time, so what’s the difference in their processes that one’s taking more or less time than the other?” says Bonne DuCharme, IS Coordinator.
The hospital is using the technology to determine the quality of a visit based on how the patient’s time was used. “One of the things that they’re looking at right now is total length of stay (measured against the length of stay through the preoperative phase) to make sure that the patients aren’t here too early, to make patient satisfaction higher,” says DuCharme, “so you can quantify and measure all of these different milestones throughout the process.”
RTLS can also contribute to a safer work environment. For example, Michigan hospital Memorial Healthcare launched its RTLS system several years ago with staff safety as its priority, while asset tracking followed as an additional use case. At Memorial Healthcare, staff members are equipped with Ekahau RTLS tags so that, in the event of an emergency in the hospital’s psychiatric unit, they can immediately request help by pressing a button on the tag. The system automatically locates that individual within the facility so that aid can get to him or her fast.
Monitoring hand hygiene
Identifying hand hygiene compliance is an increasingly popular concern among health care facilities as well. RTLS systems monitor hand-washing events and can also track patients, staff, physicians and equipment that may have been exposed to infection. The technology can bring monitoring data to hospitals that previously relied on manual audits. For example, New Cross Hospital in West Midlands County, U.K., is using a TeleTracking and CenTrak based system to boost hand hygiene compliance among its staff. Staff members can view their compliance rates at any time, via the touchscreens installed throughout the hospital. While the hospital did not expect rates of 100 percent compliance, it did find that during the first few months after the system was taken fully live, that compliance rates increased.
Any hand-hygiene based RTLS installation needs to be done with intelligence, and planning related to just how the large volume of data can be filtered and managed. It needs to do more than just generate numbers, points out Colin Furness, epidemiologist and director of research for Canadian infection control technology company Infonaut and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto.
