By Caryn Hewitt, MBA, BSN, CENP, CPHQ, Senior Director, Consulting Services, CenTrak
LinkedIn: Caryn Hewitt
LinkedIn: CenTrak
Healthcare facilities continue to face challenges when aiming to optimize healthcare performance. These hurdles range from ongoing staffing and financial disruption to clinician burnout and inadequate resources. In a recent survey, frontline workers named lack of resources and increasing involvement in clinical documentation among their top stressors. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortage of up to 124,000 physicians by 2034, driven by these ongoing challenges. Healthcare organizations must recognize and address the challenges faced by their staff and implement modern technologies that effectively support and retain their teams.
In response to the Journal of General Internal Medicine’s query on how healthcare organizations can address these struggles, healthcare professionals predominantly recommended streamlining workflows and automating processes that are often manual. The Journal found that physicians spend about 66% of their time with the patient while spending the remaining 44% on burdensome documentation. These percentages must change for better patient outcomes and more satisfied healthcare professionals.
Healthcare leaders are increasingly interested in digital tools that refine an organization’s key operations, processes, and services, and modern technologies such as Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) are surpassing expectations in achieving these goals. Leveraging RTLS, healthcare teams can effectively evaluate data from every corner of complex hospitals and healthcare campus environments. This enhances operational efficiency and allows caregivers to dedicate more time to direct patient care.
RTLS Enhances Clinician Efficiency and Patient Connection for Greater ROI
At the end of the day, clinicians want to spend more time on patient care and build personal connections with their patients. Healthcare professionals want to know they’re making a positive impact, which also leads to increased clinician well-being. After all, healthcare is fundamentally about people. RTLS’ IoT-enabled asset tags and staff badges support this desire by providing enterprise visibility within healthcare facilities. This technology ensures that team members stay aligned and up to date with each other, their equipment, and patient needs in real-time.
Patient care delays and clinical workflow bottlenecks often arise from team members needing to search for staff or equipment, manually entering data, and managing siloed systems. IoT-enabled location sensors alleviate the administrative burden on clinicians by automating the non-clinical aspects of workflow, ensuring uninterrupted, real-time updates. Without advanced location technology, 63% of healthcare workers reported spending over an hour per shift searching for necessary data or devices. Automating these tasks with RTLS cloud-based solutions enables clinicians to operate at the top of their licenses and focus on their core responsibilities. By leveraging built-in patient flow reports, organizations can monitor key metrics such as patient volume, length of stay, room utilization, patient wait times at each clinical milestone, and time spent with the care team. This eliminates the need for providers to inquire about patient whereabouts or wait for manual status updates, allowing for more efficient daily workflow management and more time to connect with patients.
RTLS works in tandem with healthcare professionals. The most successful implementations of digital solutions offer value propositions on both sides of the equation by increasing efficiencies and developing a stronger human connection — the systems create value and peace of mind for the patient and family, while also making the clinician’s job smoother, safer, and more fulfilling.
Patients Want Human and Digital Experiences
Technology’s pervasive role in daily life has led to healthcare consumers expecting their patient journey to be an equally digital experience. A recent study by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) found that 84% of healthcare decision-makers report that patients demand a “more personalized, holistic digital experience,” and 75% agree their organizations are embracing a more digital-first culture. This study highlighted several trends in digital health transformations, notably the rise of consumerism and clinician burnout. Digital technologies not only alleviate clinician burden and reduce workloads, but also enhance the patient experience and communication.
Healthcare facilities are committed to improving the patient experience. Efficient, supportive, and personalized processes begin even before the doctor’s appointment. Real-time communications, integrated with electronic medical records (EMRs), provide appointment reminders and direct patients through custom navigation and parking options relevant to patient needs, such as wheelchair-accessible paths. Straightforward digital wayfinding solutions address a common source of missed appointments – patients getting lost on the premises – and aim to solve patient frustration by improving facility navigation. Using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), GPS, Wi-Fi, or a hybrid architecture, RTLS enriches the patient experience and reduces stress with intuitive, step-by-step navigation throughout the healthcare visit.
Data-driven enterprise visibility fosters proactive patient involvement for an improved experience. With enterprise location services, patients and family members enjoy a new level of communication and transparency with their caregivers, gaining comfort, building trust, and elevating everyone’s satisfaction.
Evidence of Financial Impact for Healthcare Facilities
A recent McKinsey survey noted that nurses and staff spend about 6% of a 12-hour shift hunting and gathering key assets. RTLS, however, provides real-time asset management with detailed room- and bay-level map views, offering insights into equipment locations, usage, and maintenance schedules. Knowing the precise location and utilization of essential mobile medical equipment (MME) and equipment rentals drastically cuts down on the time staff spends searching, which improves staff efficiency, patient care response time, satisfaction, and costs.
Ensuring MME is stocked, clean, and readily available is vital for safe and prompt care. To address inefficiencies related to managing MME, Mission Hospital utilized RTLS to monitor the location and maintenance of equipment, resolving facility distribution problems. After the RTLS implementation, the hospital noticed a significant decrease in lost devices, annual savings of $200,000, and a 50% surge in nurse satisfaction. Providing asset visibility support is the initial step towards creating an operationally efficient environment for healthcare staff.
Aiming to address staff well-being, efficiency, and patient outcomes, as well as build a hospital of the future, a health system in Fort Worth, Texas leveraged an existing construction project to create a next-generation wireless system that offers RTLS-enabled workflow solutions. This decision aimed to automate non-value-added tasks and provide insights on operations improvements. By using a custom algorithm to prioritize tasks related to patient care, transport, flow, and capacity management, efficiency increased significantly. The algorithm allocated 100% of staff resources to critical operations during peak times and shifted administrative tasks to off-peak hours. Through these process changes, the hospital reached over 90% in both employee engagement and satisfaction and reported $1 million in first-year savings.
Healthcare Leaders Should Partner with Strategic RTLS Providers
To better understand the insights provided by RTLS and experience a meaningful return on investment, healthcare leadership and facility managers are encouraged to select a strategic solutions provider as their RTLS partner. By choosing a strategic partner that provides continued support, consultations, and training, healthcare facilities can reach the full ROI potential. An early investment with a strategic partner offering a comprehensive suite of solutions and cloud-based options allows the health organization to continually expand the existing system’s infrastructure to better support staff and patients as needs evolve. This interoperability ensures that the solutions are not siloed from each other and may even provide single sign-on capabilities, which further enhance staff workflow and benefit facility operations.