Jun 08, 2012The Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, a Detroit, Michigan, center solely devoted to treating cancer, has implemented a real-time location system (RTLS) provided by Versus Technology at its newly opened Dresner Family Clinic for Hematologic Malignancies and Bone Marrow Transplantation, to help manage the flow of patients and employees. The Karmanos Cancer Institute expects to eventually extend the system to other sections of its facility as well, according to Valerie Fred, the clinic's operations support specialist, and its administrator of the Versus solution.
The Detroit site—one of 41 facilities designated as cancer centers by the National Cancer Institute—serves nearly 6,000 new patients annually. The center strives to find ways in which to improve services, says Kathleen Fedoronko, Karmanos' executive director of patient care services. In that effort, she says, it conducted a survey of patient satisfaction in 2010.
"Our wait times were not as short as we wanted them to be," Fedoronko says. As a result, the hospital began examining ways to gain a better understanding of patient flow, as well as where bottlenecks may occur.
The hospital's management chose to install the RTLS solution and take it live with the March 19 opening date of the new clinic, which is dedicated to bone marrow and stem cell transplant and hematological malignancies. The Versus system provides patient status data to staff members in real time, in order to improve efficiency during their visit, and to capture historical data, thereby enabling the facility to gain insight into ways that it can further improve operations. Because the new clinic incorporates both bone marrow and hematology units that had previously been housed separately within other sections of the building, the technology can also help the staff track patient flow and employee movements, in order to ascertain the success of transitioning the two departments to the new location.
Upon arriving at the clinic, a patient first checks in and provides his or her name. The cancer center's staff is already prepared for that individual's visit, with his or her data loaded into the Versus Advantages software, residing on a dedicated server, for that day's visit. The patient can inform the office staff of any special requests, such as requiring help from a specific type of staff member, and that information can also be input into the system, to be shared with care providers throughout the visit. The front-desk staff then issues one of Karmanos' 115 Clearview badges to the patient, by scanning the bar code printed on the back of the badge and associating that ID with that person in the Versus software.
Each staff member is also assigned a badge, the unique ID number of which is permanently associated with that individual. Upon arriving at the beginning of a shift, an employee removes the assigned badge from a dedicated storage cabinet and clips it on to his or her uniform. At the end of that shift, the worker then returns the badge to the cabinet.
A total of 90 IR sensors have been installed throughout the new clinic, with at least one sensor in each room. After checking in for an appointment, a patient waits to be called into one of 29 examining rooms. As patients and staff members move about the cancer center, the IR sensors capture the ID number transmitted by each badge, and forward that location data to the Versus Advantages software. Six RFID readers also capture each ID number via the badge's 433 MHz transmission, using a proprietary air-interface protocol, in order to provide redundancy.
The clinic has installed four dedicated 42-inch screens, known as "Glance and Go" boards, each of which provides employees with a map of the floor plan, as well as the status of patients located within each room (for example, with a physician, or awaiting a doctor). The staff can also view icons representing specific personnel. If a patient's status necessitates a task on the part of the staff—such as sending in a doctor to speak with a patient waiting alone in an examining room, or assigning workers to clean an empty room—the system flags this need by changing the room's color or adding a timer to that patient's icon.
In the future, Fedoronko says, the clinic hopes to utilize the system to measure other performance indicators as well, such as the length of time that nurses or doctors spend with each patient, in addition to wait times between such visits. Because Karmanos is a teaching hospital, a patient is seen not only by his or her primary physician, but also possibly by a variety of other personnel, including research fellows, resident pharmacists, social workers and transplant coordinators. With the RTLS solution in place, Karmanos can now track the movements of all staff members, monitoring the length and frequency of visits with specific patients.
By using that data, Fedoronko says, the hospital hopes to make patient flow more efficient and faster. "Our goal is to consistently improve the services we provide, and shave time off patient visits," she states.
Within the first day of going live, Fedoronko says, she believes the system has enabled employees to become more efficient, simply based on the improved real-time data of patients' location and status that the technology provides. Down the line, this data will help Karmanos' staff take steps to further improve operational efficiency.
