HID Builds Road Map for Healthcare RTLS With Latest Acquisition

Published: July 26, 2024
  • HID Global is betting on demand for real-time visibility and data in hospitals, with its purchase of Vizzia, a BLE solution provider that features asset management and staff duress.
  • With Vizzia onboard, HID Global continues its parent company Assa Abloy’s mission to grow the company through regular acquisitions

HID Global is fulfilling its growth strategy in healthcare real-time locating system (RTLS) technology with its acquisition of Atlanta-based Vizzia Technologies. The latest buyout offers the company a new platform layer to expand into asset management, patient workflow and real-time staff duress alerting.

Vizzia is an IoT company that offers real-time tracking solutions for hospitals, including technology that manages the location, and therefore the status, of moveable medical equipment.

It also sells an RTLS-enabled Staff Duress Solution which equips healthcare workers with wearable devices that feature panic buttons, allowing users to quickly summon assistance. When hospital workers press the button, they activate a silent alarm that not only forwards the alert and the badge ID, but also its location, to the proper authorities.

HID Expanding

For HID Global, the acquisition helps further round out its portfolio for the healthcare market.

“What we’re trying to do is have a full platform for all of the top use cases that hospitals need for RTLS,” said Mark Robinton, HID Global’s IoT Services, Identification Technologies VP. There are some well-defined use cases within healthcare that HID is targeting, he pointed out: staff safety, asset management, wayfinding and hand hygiene compliance.

Already HID Global—a secure identity products company and independent subsidiary of access control firm Assa Abloy —delivers a variety of services and products related to healthcare IoT. Now, it can offer more.

The acquisition provides a benefit for Vizzia as well. “This acquisition is great for our customers and our business because it will help us accelerate our ability to bring more technologies and solutions to our customers,” said Andrew Halasz, Vizzia’s CEO.

Healthcare RTLS Demand

There are about 7,400 hospitals in the U.S. and Canada, the large percentage of which do not yet use RTLS technology. That’s a market HID Global intends to continue to serve, “to provide an offering to those that require a variety of visibility applications. The goal is that once a company installs HID infrastructure, they will have access to a growing number of applications to add on top of that infrastructure,” said Robinton.

Healthcare RTLS growth for HID dates back at least to 2016 when it acquired Bluvision, an RTLS technology company that offered a low cost, AC-powered Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 4.0 reader.

Typically, a hospital plugs the small reader into an outlet in each room of a hospital. The system uses RSSI signal strength to approximate location and HID offers software algorithms that enable machine learning over the raw data, to further specify location of BLE enabled sensors attached to assets.

Last year, HID Global also bought two vertical application companies: Connexient for Bluetooth-based wayfinding and Guard RFID, which makes wander management and infant security solutions.

Adding Asset Management

HID will leverage Vizzia’s asset management solution platform. The technology enables customers to view the location of assets like hospital beds or infusion pumps within a specific room. That not only provides healthcare providers with the location when searching for equipment, it also enables intelligence around the asset’s status and use.

For instance, the system data could enable a hospital to understand how often equipment is used, when it needs to be cleaned or maintained, and when there are more assets onsite than necessary.

If a doctor or nurse is wearing an RTLS badge that’s integrated into the Vizzia platform, the system could identify when they are visiting a specific patient, and trigger a workflow display on a screen in the room or on their tablet.

One key feature to Vizzia’s technology is the context it can bring to asset location data, said Robinton. For instance, identifying if the asset is clean or dirty based on where it has most recently been, and helping ensure that no equipment is used on a patient if it hasn’t completed the expected cleaning or sanitization, based on its detected movement and locations.

Leveraging Industry Experience

The Vizzia solution, said Robinton “is complementary for us because we can wire [HID RTLS hardware] engine into their software and make it an end-to-end option, if you already have our infrastructure.”

What attracted HID Global to Vizzia was its established history providing asset management for 19 years. “What we’ve found is that with each of these use cases there’s a domain expertise,” that makes them successful, said Robinton. “So having been through years of deployment and working with biomedical engineers and living and breathing the issues that a technician faces,” he said, Vizzia’s team offers the knowledge that HID Global was interested in.

“The technology itself isn’t always the differentiator it’s how you apply the technology to solve that problem that comes with that experience of doing it for years and years.”

Vizzia will be part of HID’s Internet of Things Services (IOTS) Business Unit and benefit from HID’s sales and other global functions to support its offering.

Bullish on Healthcare Market

HID Global expects RFID and RTLS technology use in healthcare to expand in the coming years, and for that reason it intends to continue making acquisitions of such technology companies. It is agnostic when it comes to the transmission frequency being offered. In fact, HID offers solutions with passive UHF, HF or LF RFID, as well as active (battery-powered) BLE, 433 MHz and ultra-wideband (UWB). Based on each application and the needs of the healthcare company, the different technologies all solve different problems.

Going forward, Robinton sees the company continuing “to add technologies if we need to solve different problems or adding more use cases: patient workflow or hand hygiene compliance or another piece of software that checks another upsell opportunity for those customers that are using our infrastructure.”

HID is still in the path of acquisitions and growth as part of Assa Abloy’s strategy to grow 10 percent a year: five percent organically and five percent through acquisition. Going forward, that could mean acquisitions to further enhance patient workflow and hand hygiene, for instance.

“Part of our DNA is to acquire new capabilities, new markets, new people,” Robinton said.

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About the Author: Claire Swedberg