Dec 14, 2016Hospitals and health-care providers are using real-time location system (RTLS) technology in ever-more-complex applications. As a result, managing the battery-powered devices across a hospital's enterprise becomes increasingly challenging as the systems grow and mature. Stanley Healthcare has a released a set of managed services aimed at helping its customers manage their RTLS solutions. The technology provider is offering services for monitoring its environmental tags for calibration and certification, tracking the status of asset tags, regular reviews of life-safety-based technology such as infant protection, and analytics into how customers could increase the value of their Stanley Healthcare RTLS.
According to Stanley Healthcare, the offerings are an effort to meet the needs of a larger volume of RTLS technology adopters in the health-care market across complex enterprises. In that way, the technology company hopes to simplify the management of an RTLS deployment, and to make it more effective for each customer.
Stanley Healthcare offers Wi-Fi-based RTLS solutions consisting of a software platform that manages data received from a variety of tags by a hospital's Wi-Fi access points. The applications have moved far beyond the "Where's my stuff?" phase of asset management to also include environmental monitoring (for cooler unit temperatures, for instance), patient flow, staff workflow, infant protection, employee and patient protection, and hand hygiene compliance. As deployments become larger and more complex, hospitals must dedicate and train personnel or third-party providers to help ensure that the systems are operating as needed by the hospital and within standards requirements, says Gabi Daniely, Stanley Healthcare's solutions, products and marketing VP.
Stanley Healthcare says its new solution aims to take some of those efforts out of the hands of their customers.
One managed service, known as Environmental Monitoring and Tag Calibration and Certification, is intended to help hospitals keep their environmental-monitoring tags within accepted operational standards. Typically, environmental tags must be checked and recalibrated once a year in order to meet the National Institute of Standards and Technology's requirements, for instance. This means staff members or calibration companies must go to each tag, provide calibration as needed and record that event. Stanley Healthcare offers two alternatives. The basic option is a system in which newly calibrated Stanley tags are delivered to a customer annually, replacing the existing ones. Users would swap out the old tags with the new versions, update the ID information in the software, and send the used tags back to Stanley Healthcare. The advanced version involves Stanley personnel visiting a customer's site annually, replacing the used tags and updating the new data in the software.
Several hospitals are already using these services, Daniely says.
Another service, Asset Tag Management, addresses the labor related to maintaining asset tags. The most common use case for asset tags is tracking infusion pumps, Daniely says, but they also monitor hundreds of other essential or high-value assets, including beds, wheelchairs and moveable medical equipment. Many hospitals employ thousands of such tags, each of which requires periodic battery replacement, firmware updates or other maintenance. With Asset Tag Management, Stanley Healthcare or one of its partners will visit the customer's site periodically and provide the necessary services for all of its tags, thereby ensuring they are operating properly.
A third offering, called Proactive On-Site Services, focuses on the mission-critical tags used to track the safety and location of infants and other at-risk patients. RTLS solutions typically include functionality such as locking doors or issuing alerts if an unauthorized event occurs, and hospitals must ensure that these systems are working properly. Variations, such as interference with another wireless system, reconfiguring of transmission distance or other unintended changes, can render the technology ineffective, impacting its proper operation. Proactive OnSite Services provides validation that the systems are working properly, Daniely explains, as well as any corrective action and refresher training to employees to ensure that it is being used appropriately.
Lastly, Stanley Healthcare will now offer Customer Success Management to seek ways in which the RTLS solution could be more effective. With this feature, Daniely says, "we're supporting long-term planning," which could include adding or changing use cases and providing analytics where they were not already in use.
The services offering is part of an approach by Stanley Healthcare to extend its relationship with customers beyond the solution's sale. "We're not just selling a product to a customer," Daniely states. "We want to be continuously touching the customers. In that way, we can ensure that customers are getting the most out of these systems." He says the solution aims to address not only the increasing complexity of the RTLS deployments, but also the number of customers that are using the technology but may not be getting the most out of it.
"Innovation is not just a matter of selling shiny new products," Daniely says. "It's also about the services."
