The Valley Hospital, in Ridgewood, N.J., has been using a real-time location system (RTLS) to monitor the locations and identities of staff members who press their emergency badge. Before the hospital deployed the system, only 50 percent of personnel reported a sense of workplace safety. Once those workers began utilizing the RTLS, provided by Stanley Healthcare, that figure rose to 85 percent.
The Valley Hospital rarely experiences violence in its ER, but there have been incidents in which employees have indicated feeling uncomfortable, the hospital reports. After members of a patient’s family prevented a nurse from leaving that patient’s room, that nurse asked the hospital to institute a better means of protecting personnel. The facility, which treats 74,000 patients in its emergency department each year, already offered wired emergency alarms in each room, but it decided that a wireless system would provide greater support to employees wherever they were in that department. The solution consists of Stanley Healthcare Wi-Fi-enabled call badges and software that helps security personnel identify who has placed a distress call, as well as where that person is located and what he or she looks like.
Daniel Coss, The Valley Hospital’s director of security and public safety, says that in 2015, his organization took a three-pronged approach to improving safety. The hospital increased training and education, created a “Disruption Team” to respond to emergency calls and introduced Stanley Healthcare’s AeroScout Staff Safety RTLS.
The wired panic-alarm system is still in place, enabling staff members in each room to reach for the alert box and pull its handle in order to receive assistance. However, Coss notes, the boxes may not always be easy for employees to find, and is not discreet. In contrast, a worker wearing an AeroScout badge could easily press its button without that action being noticeable to others in the room.
Coss was already familiar with the AeroScout Staff Safety solution, a technology deployed by his previous employer, a Las Vegas hospital. The system consists of a Wi-Fi-enabled badge, as well as AeroScout software running on the facility’s server to determine the identity and location of any individual who presses the badge’s button.
Coss recommended the system to The Valley Hospital, which installed the technology last fall. With the hospital’s existing Wi-Fi system, he explains, it provided location accuracy of approximately 8 to 10 feet. The facility opted to also install nearly a dozen AeroScout exciters to improve that granularity, says Rebecca Young, the supervisor of The Valley Hospital’s Emergency Department North, to ensure that it could pinpoint a worker’s location within 2 feet.
The system is voluntary, so only personnel who opt to use the technology receive a T2s badge, which is linked to that individual’s name and photo in the AeroScout software residing on the hospital’s server. The tags emit their unique identifiers to area access points via Wi-Fi signals, and the exciter transmits a unique ID number that is linked in the software to its exact location. The badge receives the low-frequency (LF) 125 kHz transmissions from the nearest AeroScout exciter, then transmits that exciter ID, along with the badge’s identifier, thereby increasing location granularity.
If an employee presses the button, the software identifies that an emergency is taking place, and an audible alert is sounded in three locations: at the desktops of Young and the clinical shift supervisor, as well as in the security office. The software displays the individual’s name, an image of that person and a view of the emergency department map, with an icon representing where the button was pressed. If the individual is moving, Young says, the very close granularity can help security personnel determine where he or she is headed, enabling them to be efficient in finding that employee.
The solution, Coss says, was less expensive than installing additional wired panic alarms. What’s more, he says, it is easier for staff members to use, and helped him to achieve his goal of deploying a system that would be “low-cost and high-yield.”
The hospital offered the badges to each of the 170 staff members who work in the emergency department. To date, approximately 100 employees are using the tags. Before the AeroScout system was installed, a survey found that respondents who agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I feel that workplace safety is taken seriously in my department” increased from 50 percent in September 2015 to 85 percent in June 2016. Those agreeing or strongly agreeing with the statement “I feel that I can easily contact security if help is needed anywhere in the department” grew from 50 percent to 88 percent during the same period.
Those percentages, Young says, are expected to further increase during future surveys.
So far, Coss reports, no emergency events have occurred within the 12 months since the system’s implementation. There have been accidental alerts when employees pressed their badge button in error, however, so the hospital knows that the technology works properly.
In the future, Young says, she expects to offer the system to all new hires and to educate them about the technology’s value, which could increase the adoption rate. However, she adds, The Valley Hospital intends to continue offering the solution only on a voluntary basis. “We didn’t want to make them feel they had to use it,” she states. Eventually, the hospital plans to expand the technology’s use to entry points throughout the facility, and to its pediatric and obstetrics units.