Identifying Bottlenecks
"A surgeon came to my office to complain about delays and the poor quality of staff performance after 3 p.m. I pulled my records, showed him the time-stamps of exactly what happened when it happened. He turned around and walked out and that was the last I heard of it – except for hearing that he told his colleague: 'Turns out we were the biggest problem. We didn't get to the rooms on time.'"
Director of Surgical Services,
500+ bed community hospital
Supporting Nurses
"Nurses are the linchpin of hospital care delivery. These frontline caregivers represent a critical and costly resource; maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of nurses is essential to the integrity of hospital function and the promotion of safe patient care."
A 36-Hospital Time and Motion Study: How Do Medical-Surgical Nurses Spend Their Time?
Staff Optimization Solution
Radianse Smart Sense technology associates
time-based location and identity information
TO AUTOMATICALLY INITIATE ACTIONS.
Find New Ways to Improve Care
Radianse Reveal Staff Optimization lets you immediately locate clinicians, technicians or any other member of the hospital staff. You can find the nearest specialist for a consultation or technician for a repair – and know that he or she is on the way. Also, know whether a clinician is otherwise occupied (a surgeon or anesthesiologist in an active OR, for example), track a housekeeper to get a room ready for a new patient – or provide added staff protection.
Tracking nurses and physicians along with medical equipment and patients provides the opportunity to improve clinical effectiveness and overall safety.
Active-RFID tags, a simple web Fast Find interface, and the intelligence of the Radianse real time location system (RTLS) help you increase efficiency, improve communications, and identify and adapt bottlenecks in clinical processes. A fast return on investment is the result.
Chief nursing officer, Large Catholic nonprofit health system
Staff Optimization - Clinical Effectiveness
Objective measures, faster response and sustainable change
Healthcare staff tracking is an integral part of a powerful use of RTLS - improving clinical effectiveness and overall safety. When a hospital always knows "who, what, when and where," there are tremendous opportunities to move healthcare forward.
Challenge: There is a need to better understand and control the spread of infectious diseases inside healthcare institutions.
Opportunity: The Radianse RTLS platform, supporting both healthcare staff tracking and patient tracking, can report early and reliably where, when and with whom patients and staff have interacted, prompting timely intervention and greater overall safety in the event of infectious disease.
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Challenge: Hospitals need to measure and improve how clinical protocols, pathways and order sets are applied in clinical practice.
Opportunity: To remove bias or human error requires an automated way to measure interactions among clinical teams and patients. When physicians, nurses, patients and equipment are covered by a Radianse RTLS, a hospital can measure and improve "door-to-doc" time or "door-to-balloon" time, in the case of an acute MI. Trimming time in each of these areas will result in better clinical outcomes and higher patient satisfaction.
Staff Optimization - Nursing Time & Motion Study
Radianse RTLS used to monitor nurse location and move healthcare forward
Radianse active-RFID tags were used as part of a 36-hospital time and motion study, the first hospital environmental study to quantify how nurses spend their time, in real time and in real work contexts. A "portable" Radianse Reveal infrastructure was installed to continuously monitor the distance traveled by the average nurse during a typical shift, and whether this movement is efficient in relation to the physical layout of the nursing unit.
"A picture emerges of the professional nurse who is constantly moving from patient room to room, nurse station to supply closet and back to room, spending a minority of time on patient care activities...."
"Download the original article on the study: A 36-Hospital Time and Motion Study: How Do Medical-Surgical Nurses Spend Their Time? (.pdf file)
