The safety and well-being of patients and staff have become one of the main challenges in the healthcare industry, as high-quality patient care depends on variables such as organizational processes, system implementation, accuracy of data insights, and support for health professionals. Studies have shown that these factors significantly influence patient safety and outcomes. The industry has been striving to recognize and address these challenges in recent years by pursuing the Triple Aim (the need to enhance the patient experience, improve population health, and lower costs), which has now evolved to factor in the importance of two additional Aims: health equity and caregiver well-being.
According to the 2024 Nursing Shortage Statistics Book, roughly 60% of nurses report feeling burnout, with as many as 13% actively considering leaving the profession altogether. Given the pervasive issue of burnout among healthcare teams, how can healthcare leadership effectively support their teams, thereby enhancing patient outcomes and choosing solutions that offer optimal ROI? An approach that is gaining more traction throughout the industry is the decision to invest in technology that enhances the connection and collaboration between patients and healthcare providers. The key concepts behind patient- and family-centered care can be applied in any healthcare setting to enhance patient safety, reduce the risk of medical error, improve processes, increase retention, and create a stronger culture of communication within the industry.
Manual tasks significantly contribute to staff burnout by adding to administrative burdens and safety concerns. These tasks amplify the stress on caregivers, diminishing their direct patient interaction time and reducing their opportunity to derive meaning from their work. Modern technologies such as real-time location systems (RTLS) have proven to better support collaboration and communication between healthcare teams, patients, and loved ones by supplying cost-effective solutions that provide scalable enterprise visibility to ease operational burdens, support efficiency, increase safety, and provide the data insights needed most by care providers.
Ensure Staff Feel Safe at Work – It’s Non-Negotiable
Healthcare leadership must prioritize the well-being of healthcare professionals by assessing their comfort levels—specifically, how safe they feel in their daily work environment. Establishing a secure environment for both staff and patients is crucial for fostering peace of mind and enabling staff to concentrate more effectively on patient care needs.
Decision-makers must consider transformational technologies that provide actionable data insights to support the needs they’re hearing from healthcare teams, meet their leadership goals, and offer scalability for ongoing development as facility needs may change over time. RTLS that leverages Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) provides easy implementation and scalability. By utilizing existing BLE-enabled hospital networks and infrastructure, the integrating technology accelerates the adoption of location-based services with tag and badge-only deployments for key use cases such as staff duress, asset tracking, and more.
Mobile staff duress solutions are significantly enhancing safety in hospitals and healthcare facilities nationwide by providing enterprise visibility for real-time insights and enabling rapid response capabilities. To guarantee the quickest response time during an emergency, the duress buttons are physically located on team members in the form of a wireless staff badge. When staff are in a situation where they feel unsafe, they must have the ability to summon additional resources and security at any time and from any location. RTLS duress solutions leverage clinical-grade enterprise visibility and provide real-time acknowledgment that a duress alert has been received by the security team, providing peace of mind.
RTLS with a BLE multi-mode system that offers hybrid architecture can be an even greater asset for those seeking to balance precision location insights and affordability. Finding a strategic solution partner who offers this technology allows teams to effortlessly transition between BLE and other visibility environments according to the needs of different departments. The system’s interoperability empowers healthcare facilities to leverage mixed RTLS infrastructure within a single department, building, or across an entire hospital campus.
The IoT technology and location sensors behind RTLS technology feature wearable badges to provide immediate, comprehensive enterprise visibility for the precise location of equipment, colleagues, or patients (including newborns) to improve response time and streamline workflow. These location technologies play a pivotal role in automating aspects of staff workloads and provide insights to reduce bottlenecks and inefficiencies, ensuring that staff can instead spend more time doing what they love – caring for their patients.
Lift Administrative Burdens with Automation for Greater Satisfaction
Upon implementing an RTLS solution or enterprise-wide system, healthcare organizations can analyze actionable data to optimize resource allocation, ensuring departments are adequately staffed during peak periods to maximize support. Healthcare professionals desire access to unified platforms that automate workflow to alleviate the burden of manual documentation in a truly impactful way. Lessening the workloads of healthcare professionals is a critical aspect of combating burnout, improving care, growing satisfaction, and investing in retention.
Advanced workflow platforms, using RTLS, streamline non-clinical tasks by assigning badges at patient check-in. This provides automatic updates on patient status, estimated wait times, and displays staff views on easy-to-read boards detailing each patient’s journey. The use of this technology allows teams to be on the same page with minute-by-minute visibility to continuously measure interactions and roadblocks.
To further ensure teams are on the same page and reduce potential roadblocks, some of the top solution providers offer a secure, high-performance cloud environment to software applications. Cloud-based software simplifies implementation and maintenance, reducing costs and easing the labor-intensive management typically associated with physical servers. These offerings can also provide automatic and proactive application updates throughout the lifecycle of the product. With cloud-based systems, essential functions such as user management, staff assignments, facility maps, site structures, and device configurations are performed on one connected platform. As decision-makers review SaaS options, select a system that provides integrated access, data sharing, and Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities for a comprehensive suite of management tools and RTLS solution applications (i.e., Duress, Asset Tracking, Clinical Workflow, Hand Hygiene, etc.).
Increase Time Allocated to Patient Care to Increase Positive Outcomes
Patient care delays and clinical workflow bottlenecks often arise from dealing with siloed systems, manual data entry, and searching for necessary staff and equipment. In the absence of advanced location technology and automated non-clinical tasks, 63% of healthcare workers reported spending over an hour per shift seeking necessary data or devices. By automating these tasks with RTLS cloud-based solutions, clinicians can devote more time to patient care, reduce stress around equipment location, gain insights on availability and status, and operate at the top of their licenses. With built-in patient flow reports, organizations can monitor crucial metrics such as patient volume, length of stay, room utilization, patient wait times at each clinical milestone, and time spent with the provider. This eliminates the need for providers to inquire about the location of crucial equipment or wait for manual status updates, allowing for more efficient daily workflow management and timely patient care with the proper tools.
RTLS also offers real-time room and bay-level map views, lists medical equipment locations and detailed equipment usage, and provides alerts for equipment maintenance and cleaning to further reduce bottlenecks. Once asset management RTLS tags are placed on the necessary equipment, staff can view the precise location of equipment in seconds and quickly locate the tools they need to provide high-quality care.
Technology Insights Should Be Paired with Human Insights
To ensure greater workflow efficiency, higher safety standards, the ultimate patient and staff experiences, and substantial ROI, strategic location technology partners offer expert-led consulting and training services. These programs provide tailored, multi-tiered assessments and transformational practices to review pain points and consider the right technology to deploy to fully benefit patients (including infants), staff, and the health organization. Healthcare teams can then maximize their location technologies to drive meaningful change throughout their enterprise using practical, ongoing guidance.
About Mary Jagim
Mary Jagim is an experienced leader in healthcare consulting with an expertise in real-time location systems, emergency nursing, healthcare operations, and public policy. In 2001, she served as the national president of the Emergency Nurses Association (ENA) and led the development of ENA’s Key Concepts in ED Management Course and Guidelines in Emergency Department Staffing Tool. She was also a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Study on the Future of Emergency Care and the National Quality Forum E.D. Consensus Standards Committee as the Principal Consultant for CenTrak, Mary works with healthcare organizations to leverage real-time technologies coupled with process enhancements to improve the patient experience, patient and staff safety and workflow efficiency. Having implemented hundreds of real-time location system projects in the last 15 years, Mary is one of the most experienced clinical leaders and implementers in Healthcare RTLS in the world and developed the “Jagim Lean RTLS Model for Healthcare.” She also currently serves as a member of the IoT Community, Healthcare Advisory Board.
