“Not Just Assets”: How RLTS Is Going Beyond Entry-Level Use Cases to Help Improve Efficiency and Engagement

When it comes to real-time location systems, the discussion is often centered around asset tracking. And although that is a key component, RTLS — when leveraged to the fullest extent — can be part of a larger strategy to improve patient engagement, staff efficiency, employee safety, and even nurse retention.

“Our vision is to make sure we’re offering the most trusted and personalized coordinated care,” said Joel Vengco, SVP and Chief Information & Digital Officer, Hartford HealthCare, during a panel discussion. “To be able to do that, you need to know where everything in your organization is moving. It’s not just assets; it’s patients, providers, and nurses.”

RTLS can deliver the data and insights that organizations need to improve overall operations. But it truly does start at the base level, according to Vengco and co-panelists Niel Oscarson (Research Director, KLAS) and Teresa Brasac (Chief Clinical & Informatics Officer, Sonitor). During the webinar, they shared perspectives on the key benefits of RTLS — both now and in the next phases, how it can positively affect clinical workflows.

“Entry level uses cases”

Like most technologies, RTLS can be organized into different buckets, with one being tracking and monitoring and another being data analytics. Some of these “entry-level use cases,” as Vengco coined them, include leveraging real-time location to track assets such as medical devices, pumps, workstations, and even beds, which can extremely beneficial for organizations like Hartford Healthcare that are spread out geographically. “To know what needs to be replaced and what can be put back into the fleet” can play a critical role in controlling costs and improving supply chain efficiency, he said.

Before his team looked into redesigning the supply chain using RTLS, they found most processes to be cumbersome. “It was a pebble in the shoe for clinicians who were ordering the supplies, and folks who were running to get the supplies,” Vengco noted. After implementing RTLS, departments began realizing “significant improvements in workflow” by reducing the time needed to access supplies. “That’s been a big benefit.”

With so many organizations dealing with financial challenges, it’s becoming critical to identify as many of those benefits as possible, said Oscarson. “We have to think very deeply about not just the experience, but the efficiency gains that come with it.” The pebble analogy, he continued, applies to operations as a whole. “The more pebbles we can remove, the smoother the entire process. And RTLS is one of the areas that can have a significant impact.”

Patient engagement

And it’s not just on the staffing side; improving patient experience is another key driver for monitoring solutions. “As we think about engaging patients in a better way and improving workflows, we want to know that a nurse is rounding the units and seeing patients every 10 minutes and greeting family members,” said Vengco.

That engagement can make a big impact, noted Oscarson, who talked about the potential for RTLS to improve the experience by enabling patients to pick up a tag when they enter the waiting room. At that point, the staff is notified of a patient’s arrival and can promptly obtain the information needed to proceed. “There are opportunities to make the experience a much easier flow than we’ve had in the past,” he said.

Other areas of opportunity include employee safety and nursing retention, which can go hand-in-hand. At Hartford, staff members who wear RTLS-enabled tags can quickly and easily notify staff in the event of violence. In doing so, organizations are able to provide a safer and more efficient environment, which can lead to longer tenures.

“For nurses, it feels like an incredibly professional environment when they feel that you really care about their time,” said Brasac. “That’s really important, especially when nurses are a scarce resource.”

Oscarson concurred, adding that while “measurable items” like reduced length of stay and A/R days can be useful in making a case, what’s just as important are factors like balancing the workload and decreasing duress. “We’re not great at measuring some of those elements,” he said. “We need to be more creative.”

The next phase

As with any investment, the emphasis can’t just be on what RTLS can do now, but how it can help improve outcomes going forward, Oscarson said. One of those potential functions is pushing out automated cues to clean a room when a patient checks out. That way, “no one has to check a box and say, ‘come do this,’” he noted. “That may seem like a marginal improvement, but when they add up, it can be impactful in facing daunting challenges.”

Another is integrating RTLS with nurse call systems, which can dramatically improve workflows by enabling one function: automatically cancelling patient calls, according to Brasac, a nurse by training. “I can’t tell you how tedious it is to cancel a call. It seems simple, but it’s not,” she said. Leveraging RTLS to sense that a caregiver has entered a room and immediately terminating the request can be a huge win in terms of satisfaction.

“There’s a big bang for your buck in helping to drive rounding activities and produce reports on the backend for tracking and trending,” Brasac stated. In some of the implementations Sonitor has done, integrating RTLS with nurse call has led to a “considerable increase” in satisfaction scores, which can translate to financial savings.

And it doesn’t have to stop with nurse call systems. “We talk about asset tracking as a basic use case, but it becomes more advanced when you integrate with certain systems like CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Software),” she said. Another application is recall alert software, which can expedite the process of determining which pieces of equipment are being recalled, locating them, and notifying users. “It actually takes away five to six steps,” she added.

Through these types of use cases, RTLS can help kick off other workflows, according to Vengco, whether it’s by automating rudimentary tasks or providing valuable insights at the point of care. “It can solve a lot of problems,” he said.

Look to the future

To fully reap the benefits of the technology, however, organizations must have a solid foundation in place, noted Vengco. “If we’re going to go beyond some of the basic use cases and get into precision-based location with advanced analytics layered on top, it’s going to require a different infrastructure” than the one he inherited in 2022.

“As we start to think about refreshing and redesigning our network, we’re thinking about specific connectivity so that we don’t find ourselves in a place where we’re going to have to implement additional access points,” he said.

Part of that future-proofing strategy includes selecting a vendor partner that not only provides solid solutions, but also can “integrate broadly into your ecosystem” and connect to existing devices.

Through its open platform and high-tech ultrasound solution, Sonitor is able to check those boxes, said Brasac. Its new platform (SonitorONE), which was unveiled at HIMSS24, offers users a choice of tags and accuracy levels based on need, while supporting six locating technologies. “It allows us to provide affordable scalability to rich data,” she noted.

Beyond technological offerings, however, it’s critical that vendors are able to act as a true partner, said Oscarson. “That’s where a lot of the impact is.” His advice to leaders, based on KLAS findings, is to “ask careful questions about how they will help you with adoption and change management in rolling these out.”

And with machine leaning and AI tools assuming a larger role in strategic planning, it’s becoming increasingly important to ensure all users have access to “the cleanest, most accurate data,” said Brasac. That means ensuring your RTLS solution provide the correct location, time, and proximity, and in doing so, provide the visibility that “is key to operational excellence.”

Vengco agreed, adding that regardless of what form of RTLS is utilized, “you need that technology to be able to understand organizationally how things are moving and flowing,” he said. “Without that sensing or monitoring capability, you’re not going to have the data to be able to improve operations.”

At the end of the day, he concluded, “what we’re trying to do is deliver better care. And it starts with how we operate.”

To view the archive of this webinar — Enabling Asset Tracking & Facilitating Clinical Workflows with Person-Centered RTLS (Sponsored by Sonitor) — please click here.