- John Tudor
In the times when colossal corporate hospitals
and large medical cities are mushrooming up, knowing the real-time location and
status of medical equipment, patients and skilled staff resources is critical
to overall hospital operational efficiency.
Real time location systems, frequently
abbreviated as RTLS, provide inherent characteristics which have both immediate
tactical short-term benefits as well as long-term strategic implications for
hospital operations. RTLS offers the extraordinary ability to find and manage
mobile equipment assets and locate people – in
real-time – from any computer or mobile device in the hospital.
Real time location systems provide
hospital administrators with actionable information regarding the location,
status and movement of equipment and people (hospital staff and patients). With
RTLS, hospitals have access not only to the specific locations of equipment and
people – but also advanced RTLS search capabilities allowing searching by
specific location (floor, area, room) or unique asset identifier (department
owner, type, manufacturer, model number, asset control number or EIN). It
provides the decision-making intelligence which lets the hospital administrator
to decide for buying only the equipment which is needed, decrease rentals, and
reduce out-of-service time and missing items.
The detailed asset information and
reporting capabilities of RTLS allow further analysis to support a variety of
uses, including equipment utilization data to identify inefficiencies that have
required excess equipment inventory purchases, specific asset searches by
manufacturer or model number for retrieval of equipment subject to recall,
understanding of instances where patient safety is compromised when non-sterile
instrumentation may be used for patient procedures, and collection of data to
optimize equipment placement.RTLS also helps to map the quickest route to the
equipment needed during the times of urgency.
The
RTLS solution spans the depth and breadth of the hospital enterprise,
automating and streamlining many core processes in the healthcare environment.
These include:
- Automatically managing patient flow in clinical units
- Locating and routing movable medical equipment to ensure their proper cleaning, maintenance, distribution, and security
- Monitoring and documenting staff members’ compliance with hand hygiene requirements and other infection-containment protocols
- Monitoring temperature-controlled environments, logging out-of-range events, and documenting corrective actions
- Managing turnover of inpatient beds by monitoring occupancy, status, and availability
The Apollo Hospital, Chennai was the first
one in India to adopt Wi-Fi based RTLS system since 2010 to track patients who
are having various tests done as part of their annual check-up, in order to
better utilize hospital resources and shorten patient wait times.
This technology needs
computers as their platforms which will have the software specially designed to
interpret the inputs given by the RTLS to the administrators. Special software
can be developed for the same or it can be integrated with the current hospital
management information system (HMIS). The information output can also be
transmitted on a mobile device like a tablet PC or a cellphone for the
administrator on the move.
Although this idea is
relevant to large corporate hospitals which are prevailing in the urban
populations but if implemented successfully and economically, its usefulness
can be taken over to large public sector hospitals as well.
Thus it can be
easily summed that advanced RTLS brings an unparalleled level of expertise that
helps hospitals react with greater speed, proactively eliminate redundancy,
improve patient flow, and deliver an exceptional level of patient care.
Dr.
Vikas Mukhija,
MHA-Hospital (2011-13)
