- The Real Value of RTLS in Healthcare
- Wayfinding Provides a Better Overall Experience
- Combining Wayfinding and Indoor Tracking Through SaaS
Jun 19, 2022It's no secret that in the coming years, the demand for real-time location systems (RTLS) is expected to grow into a multi-billion-dollar industry. The value of RTLS in healthcare is increasing in perception but not in adoption, due to the high cost of building and deploying today's custom infrastructure-based systems.
Only 10 percent to roughly 30 percent of healthcare systems can afford and are actively using an RTLS solution. But it's not just healthcare. Other industries, such as convention centers, warehouses, hotels and construction companies, are catching on to the value of RTLS, yet like healthcare, the smaller of them cannot afford to actually install it.
Today's facility managers believe that RTLS is a "luxury" or "nice to have," with some wariness about its accuracy and actual return on investment. If RTLS adoption is slower than industry anticipation, this will be a major factor. Moreover, there are two different mechanics of RTLS that facilities want and need—indoor tracking and wayfinding—but they must pay extra to have the additional infrastructure built to achieve both.
The Real Value of RTLS in Healthcare
Mohammed Smadi
Each year, hospitals can lose up to $4,000 per bed, while a third of nurses spend an hour of time, on average, simply searching for the equipment or supplies they need for patient care. Moreover, the perceptions generated from patient experience often turn into customer sentiment shared online, which has become a powerful resource for attracting patients to healthcare facilities.
The benefits of RTLS on operations, loss prevention, patient safety, care and experience, along with increased employee satisfaction, are well documented. But how do smaller healthcare facilities and systems keep up with emerging technologies for better care when they can't afford the RTLS solutions currently available?
Take, for example, the largest veteran's hospital in Saudi Arabia, which experiences extremely high numbers of missed appointments, costing the facility thousands each year. Its particular goal, in deploying an RTLS solution with both indoor tracking and wayfinding, is to reduce the number of missed appointments, thus saving money and ensuring the best use of staff and physician time.
This is a particular problem for the industry as a whole, with some opting to charge missed appointment fees. Yet RTLS can ensure that patients who may have trouble navigating a large facility make it to their appointments on time and receive text message reminders. Moreover, the hospital now has improved indoor asset tracking of supplies and equipment that streamline—and even improve—patient care.
Wayfinding Provides a Better Overall Experience
The majority of healthcare facilities see the value of indoor asset tracking and patient security, but RTLS technologies can go much further than that and provide a better perception on the intangibleness of "experience." Customer experience is a vital part of any business's marketing these days. With the increase of online reviews, sometimes anonymous, the reputation of any facility, as perceived by patients or consumers, matters.
That's why nearly every industry is pouring money into identifying and creating valuable, meaningful experiences for their customers. These companies are expanding this idea to include their employees and understanding how their experience at work can increase retention. At healthcare facilities, some of the biggest complaints include the struggle to navigate large buildings, as well as the amount of time spent waiting in an ER, and patients have no problem letting their social-media followers know their frustrations.
Everyone is used to GPS now, but the problem is that existing GPS systems historically do not work in healthcare buildings for a variety of reasons. The intuitiveness of using GPS to navigate inside buildings can leave patients and staff members feeling frustrated when it is unavailable or unreliable. This can cause them to be late to appointments, even give up and miss them altogether, decreasing overall productivity and, ultimately, sentiment and perception.
Even when a facility is already using indoor tracking for the "Location of Things," it can be more productive when combined with indoor wayfinding. Example: An employee is looking for a wheelchair that is shown to be located within another wing of the building that is unfamiliar. With wayfinding, the time spent to get to the item and return it to where it is needed can be greatly reduced.
Whether it's a new patient or employee, indoor wayfinding is proving to increase positive patient and staff sentiment, which has real financial value. From navigating a new, large building to locating equipment or finding a doctor's office, wayfinding is a crucial part of successful operations and perception for any facility and system, so it's understandable that facilities want it as much as they want indoor tracking capabilities.
However, the expense for two systems, or for one custom-built system to deploy both, is out of reach for most operations. A 2017 survey of employees at Geneva University Hospital shows that they and patients alike would benefit from indoor wayfinding when navigating their way through large hospitals.
Combining Wayfinding and Indoor Tracking Through SaaS
Few RTLS solutions currently available offer the capabilities of both indoor tracking and wayfinding, and the complexities and expense of building such a system, customized for each, are out or reach for most facilities. However, it can be made easier by rethinking the approach of RTLS as software-as-a-service (SaaS).
Today's RTLS technologies rely on both hardware and software, meaning that a new infrastructure must be custom-built to deliver the benefits of the system—but hardware can degrade over time, leading to additional expenses to upgrade. Rethinking RTLS as SaaS creates both an affordable and efficient system that easily deploys both indoor tracking and wayfinding for improved operations, loss prevention, patient and staff safety, care and experience, with the return on investment that facility management needs. This opens the door for widespread adoption of RTLS that is all-encompassing.
Mohammed Smadi is the managing director of PenguinIN, where he leads the business and technical development of opportunistic, managed indoor positioning solutions. Prior to PenguinIN, Mohammed founded Karmatix, a telematics-based loyalty program, where he coined the term "road-as-a-service." He was also a principal researcher at BlackBerry, driving quality of experience over Wi-Fi, and a cofounder of ErgoWiFi, a technology provider for solar-powered Wi-Fi mesh access points. Mohammed holds more than 25 granted or pending patents, in addition to authoring several refereed papers and book chapters. He has a Ph.D., an M.A.Sc and a B.Eng. & Mgmt. from McMaster University's Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, where he is currently an adjunct assistant professor.
