Philly Hospital Uses RTLS to Track Patient Flow, Care and Training

Amelior EDTracker has been integrated with the hospital's other back-end systems, such as those used by radiology and labs. Any treatment ordered for a patient is documented manually in Amelior EDTracker by a nurse. Once that order is inputted, it is sent automatically. "So the patient's whereabouts, which doctors and nurses treated him, and what was ordered (and when) is all documented," Villarin says. The time and date a lab specimen is received, and that lab work is completed, are also entered and updated in the software, so doctors and nurses treating the patient are aware of the lab work's status.

Since the expansion, renovation and implementation of its RTLS, Albert Einstein Medical Center has seen a $4.5 million increase in hospital revenue and a 24 percent increase in the number of patients in its emergency department and hospital admissions. The facility has decreased payment denials for emergency department services from 3.4 percent to 2.1 percent, reduced the percentage of people who come into the emergency department but leave before treatment is completed from more than 5 percent to between 1 and 2 percent, and shortened the length of hospital stays.

Equally important to tracking patient flow and improving the emergency department's ability to treat patients efficiently and effectively is the hospital's use of its RTLS to monitor the training of residents and interns. Since staff members wear tagged badges, the system can capture which residents visit which patients, as well as which doctors work with which residents.

"We can track the interacting between attending physicians and residents," Villarin says. "We can track how many sick patients residents see, versus patients that aren't very sick. We have a million data elements we can capture, and it helps us know how efficient our residents are—what's lacking. We can improve their throughput and efficiency by monitoring." While tracking residents' and interns' training doesn't directly affect the emergency department, he notes, "it does affect our emergency department's efficiencies and throughput."

The RTLS also enables the hospital to evaluate its doctors' performance. At monthly faculty meetings, each doctor receives a report, generated by an EDTracker program designed for data analysis from PCTS, that quantifies the number of patients treated by that physician, as well as the time it took to treat those patients, how often each person was visited, the length of time before each was discharged or moved out of the emergency department, and more.

The Albert Einstein Medical Center is now working with PCTS to integrate Amelior EDTracker with a new system it is implementing for electronic medical records. Once that is complete, the hospital will have a single portal for all patient data, including real-time location data, patient charting and other information, such as diagnoses, treatment plans, age and weight-based medication dosing and medication alerts.