REAL-TIME LOCATION SYSTEMS
cause the RTLS was part of the new construction, and because 75 percent of the
staff was new to Memorial Health System and didn’t have to unlearn any old
habits. “They loved it and embraced it,”
O’Connor says.
In addition to clinical efficiencies, the
RTLS is generating hard-dollar returns
in at least two ways. First, patients have
to turn in their locator badges as part of
discharge, and the hospital paired badge
collection with the collection of any co-pays that are due at discharge. Co-pay collections went up 60 percent. Second, the
RTLS makes it easier to track which type
of bed patients are in, and capture the
correct charge when they’re moved from
the courtesy lounge to an inpatient bed.
BOCA RATON REGIONAL HOSPITAL:
Quicker response,
better care
Boca Raton Regional Hospital’s new RTLS
improves care by allowing nursing staff to
respond to patients more quickly, and letting supervisors track patient contacts.
“It’s enabled nurse call to be to be much
more personal,” says Chief Nursing Officer
Melissa Durbin. “We can run reports and
see how quickly a call was answered, and
we can escalate the call to the appropriate
person.” The unit clerk decides whether
the patient needs a nurse for medication
administration, or a patient care assistant
for ice or help to the restroom.
The 375-bed hospital had been considering a replacement facility, but when
that fell through, it decided to pursue replacing its aging nurse call system. The
new one, from Critical Alert Systems,
Jacksonville, Fla. (formerly known as Intego), was installed in 2010 and included
RTLS capabilities for staff, patients and
equipment. CIO Robin Hildwein liked
the way that the infrared-based location
system piggybacked onto existing nurse
call wiring.
The biggest challenge was getting the
infrared locators in the right places, so
that the system registered accurately.
“Originally, we had auto-cancel turned
on, so that the call would automatically be
cancelled when a caregiver responded,”
Hildwein says. “But the locator signal was
so strong that if the caregiver was just outside the room, it could cancel the request
because it would assume the caregiver
had come in.” She spent several months
rectifying the problem, aided by an engineer from Intego.
The solution was to lower the signal
strength of the locators and install an additional one near the bed in each room.
Because the badges can’t be detected by
two locators at once, caregivers were only
registered if they were picked up by the
locator near the bed. Now there are locators down the center of each hallway, plus
two in each patient room and one in each
room’s bathroom. “Now we have very high
reliability,” Hildwein says.
NORTHWEST MICHIGAN
SURGERY CENTER:
Controlling the chaos
The staff at Northwest Michigan Surgery
Center in Traverse City Mich., knew when
they were having a bad day, but a real-time
location system is helping them understand them exactly why—and how to fix it.
With about 20,000 procedures a year,
the center is one of the largest freestanding surgery centers in the country. “It’s
controlled chaos, so having visibility into
exactly what the chaos is gives us more
control,” says Brett McGreaham, supply
chain manager. A staff survey in late 2011
revealed that post-operative patient flow
was a huge source of stress.
“There was a lot of dissatisfaction with
the workload and the efficiency expected,”
McGreaham says. “We wanted to raise morale and productivity in the post-op area. ”
In May, the center installed a RTLS
from Versus, also in Traverse City, to track
the movements of staff and patients. It
pays a monthly fee partially based on patient volume, that’s equivalent to about
half an FTE, McGreaham estimates. The
largest hardware investment was six flat
“All the
ancillaries are
in sync with
each other.”
—Sharon O’Conner
screens that show staff and waiting families where the patients are. The system
uses infrared light picked up by sensors
in each surgery bay. The RTLS interfaces
with an EHR system from SourceMedical,
Wallingford, Conn., to trade such information as patient name, date of surgery,
surgeon, and type of anesthesia. The center doesn’t have a dedicated I. T. person,
but McGreaham was able to handle the
installation without formal training.
Once implementation was complete, it
became simple to gather data on how long
patients spend in each stage of surgery,
and to anticipate when they’d be ready for
the next stage. Managers could easily see
where surgeries spiked and staff accordingly. While McGreaham has not computed a formal return on investment, he
notes that the center is handling a higher
volume of procedures but hasn’t had to
hire as many staff as it anticipated.
The surgeons hold a majority interest
in the center, and couldn’t be required
to wear the tracking badges. About 90
percent do, though. “Most of the staff
saw the value after a week or two,” Mc-
Greaham says. “Some of the physicians
were more combative. But their peers are
seeing more efficient days. We tell them,
if you don’t want to wear badge it’s fine,
but then you can’t complain about your
efficiency or turnover times.”
McGreaham plans to apply data from
the RTLS more systematically in the next
year to make procedures more efficient.
Meanwhile, the change is visible. “We used
to have a huge book of who was where on
the unit clerk’s desk, with everyone hover-
ing around trying to see it,” he says. “Now
we have all that stuff on the boards.”
