From the April 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Furness says the company found that simply providing data about how often nurses, for instance, wash their hands isn’t, in and of itself, of great benefit. “The system tells you there is a problem, but does not offer enough information for a solution, now you have something to keep you up at night,” he says.
The company found that while tracking proper procedural behavior is important, these measurements require some intervention as well — educating staff, for instance, as to where problems occur. “RTLS is great for taking invisible problems and making them visible,” Furness says. However, health care facilities then need to know what they will do with the data. “Our data gives you the starting point,” he says. Infonaut conducted testing at a hospital in New York to determine whether equipment was staying in isolation rooms, as intended, or coming out. That information allows the hospital to view where the problems are and then train staff to ensure equipment does not move in unauthorized ways that could lead to an infection.
In addition, RTLS can enable hospitals to quickly access a history of who, based on the RTLS badges they wear, was in the vicinity of a patient who is found to have a dangerous, communicable disease, allowing the facility to take the proper actions for staff and patient safety.
The point, he says, is for RTLS to solve problems, but only if the user asks the right questions and knows what to do with “the fire hose of data” that they’re presented with.
Reducing Delays
Delays are one of the most costly problems for health care facilities. The time between a patient’s discharge orders and his or her actual departure from the hospital can be hours. RTLS systems such as Teletracking’s create automated discharge alerts for those who need to know in real time when the patient actually leaves the hospital, triggering processes needed to admit another patient and ensuring that the room is ready.
The University Hospital of Valencia, (La Fe), in Spain is using RTLS to track both patients and assets to boost efficiency of its patient care and also reduce errors. The system includes tags for patients and assets, and RFID readers built into mobile carts, allowing the staff to identify each patient before providing them with services. Fixed readers ensure the hospital knows when patients are moved through the OR process, when rooms are available and therefore when those rooms should be prepared for the next patient.
By taking inefficiencies out of the flow process (by displaying bed status — occupied, dirty, vacant — as well as providing status updates about patient delays), automated solutions add as much as 20 percent more usable capacity without adding a single bed.
