ROI and Use Cases: Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) in Healthcare

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ROI and Use Cases: Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) in Healthcare

As we address pain points that can be solved with RTLS, we naturally gravitate towards healthcare problems. In today’s world, having a well-structured digital foundation is vital. The use of RTLS is gradually becoming an essential addition to every healthcare facility, prioritizing patient safety and optimizing services while ensuring smooth operations where mistakes are minimized. This article provides insights into the important use cases of RTLS solutions and the quantifiable ROI it brings.

 

Use Cases

Asset Management and Optimization: RTLS enables precise tracking and management of crucial medical assets, such as infusion pumps, wheelchairs, and monitoring devices. By efficiently locating and monitoring these assets in real-time, healthcare facilities experience reduced downtime, minimized equipment loss, and increased asset utilization rates.

Enhanced Patient Safety: With RTLS, patient safety takes center stage. Hospitals can monitor patient movements, prevent elopement incidents, and optimize patient flow. Real-time alerts and notifications ensure timely responses to emergencies, fostering an environment of enhanced patient security and care.

Streamlined Workflows: RTLS optimizes staff movements, streamlining workflows and resource allocation. This leads to reduced wait times for patients, improved staff productivity, and ultimately, better patient experiences.

Contact Tracing: RTLS plays a critical role in maintaining infection control protocols within healthcare facilities. By tracking the movements of medical staff and patients, hospitals can quickly identify and contain potential outbreaks. RTLS data can also be used to analyze patterns of contact and potential transmission, facilitating targeted interventions to prevent the spread of infections.

Hand Hygiene Monitoring: Hand hygiene compliance is vital for patient safety. RTLS enables real-time monitoring of healthcare professionals’ handwashing practices, ensuring adherence to protocols and reducing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). Immediate feedback promotes a culture of awareness, enhancing patient outcomes. Analyzing compliance trends aids staff training, elevating patient care with PenguinIN’s comprehensive RTLS solutions. Discover how RTLS revolutionizes hand hygiene for North American healthcare facilities.


 

ROI Drivers –

Cost Savings from Asset Utilization: Research conducted in North American hospitals has highlighted the substantial financial impact of asset theft and loss. Multiple studies have demonstrated that the annual cost of hospital equipment losses, attributed to theft or misplacement, can possibly range from $4000 to $12,000 per bed. This translates to annual losses that could range from $400,000 to $1,200,000.

Increased Patient Throughput: By minimizing patient wait times and optimizing bed turnover, RTLS can help hospitals accommodate more patients. A 15% increase in patient throughput, reported in several case studies, could lead to potential annual revenue growth of $2 million per facility.

Avoidance of Legal Liabilities: Implementing RTLS in elderly care units led to an 80% reduction in patient elopement incidents in North American healthcare facilities. This reduction ensures patient safety and mitigates potential legal liabilities, protecting hospitals from substantial financial consequences.


 

PenguinIN: An Affordable RTLS Provider with a Simplified Managed System

PenguinIN takes pride in offering a cost-effective and user-friendly RTLS solution that caters to the specific needs of healthcare providers. Our simplified managed solutions (PENTRACK & PENNAV) ensure seamless integration into existing infrastructures, eliminating the need for complex and costly installations.

Through our advanced tracking technology, healthcare facilities can optimize asset utilization, streamline workflows, and enhance patient safety, all while achieving significant cost savings. With PenguinIN as a reliable RTLS partner, hospitals can focus on delivering top-notch patient care, confident in the knowledge that their operational efficiency and ROI are maximized.

Read more about our process to align with “CBAHI” and how we help our clients achieve regulatory compliance in our in-depth article.


 

Conclusion

The ROI of Real-Time Location Systems in the healthcare industry is undeniable, with North American healthcare facilities experiencing substantial cost savings, improved patient care, and optimized operations.

As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve, RTLS emerges as a transformative solution, bringing precision and efficiency to healthcare operations. PenguinIN’s affordable RTLS offering, coupled with a simplified managed system, positions us as a leading provider in the market, empowering healthcare organizations to unlock the true potential of RTLS and thrive in an era of precision healthcare. With a multitude of use cases, RTLS becomes an indispensable tool in elevating healthcare services to new levels of excellence.

With PenguinIN as your trusted partner, we deliver innovative and tailored RTLS solutions for your indoor positioning and tracking needs.

Contact us today to enhance your indoor positioning capabilities.

Learn more about our solutions here



Source* – Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) to improve fall detection

Exploring BLE 5.1 and Ultra-Wideband Technologies for Real-Time Location Systems

In the world of indoor tracking and positioning, advanced technologies are shaping the way organizations optimize their operations. Two key players in this space are Ultra-Wideband (UWB) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.1. PenguinIN, a leading provider of innovative RTLS solutions, is at the forefront of these developments.

In this article, compare UWB and BLE 5.1 for purposes of indoor positioning. Discover the power and advantages of these cutting-edge technologies as we explore their impact on RTLS applications.

 

Understanding Ultra-Wideband (UWB):

UWB is a short-range wireless communication technology that utilizes low power levels and wide frequency bands. It enables highly accurate positioning and tracking by transmitting ultra-short duration pulses with low interference and high immunity to multipath effects. UWB excels in providing sub-meter level accuracy, making it ideal for applications requiring precise location information in complex indoor environments.

 

Exploring Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.1:

BLE 5.1 is an advanced version of the Bluetooth wireless technology designed specifically for low power consumption and extended range applications. It offers information that can be used at the application layer to calculate location. The most common approaches to calculate location using BLE 5.1 are Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD). BLE 5.1 offers enhanced localization accuracy compared to previous versions, making it suitable for applications that require moderate to high accuracy in tracking assets or people.

 

Comparing UWB and BLE 5.1 for RTLS

 

Accuracy and Precision:

While UWB has gained a reputation for its remarkable accuracy, offering sub-meter precision. With the right implementation, BLE 5.1 is also able to achieve excellent accuracy even in challenging propagation environments. has made significant improvements competitive accuracy, typically sub-meter as well.

Understanding the use case (i.e. the required accuracy and the propagation environment) should be precursor to choosing the technology.

 

Range and Coverage:

BLE 5.1 boasts a longer communication range compared to UWB, allowing for broader coverage in larger areas. While UWB has a limited range of up to 100 meters, BLE 5.1 can reach distances of up to 300 meters, making it suitable for applications requiring wider coverage, like warehouse tracking or campus-wide asset monitoring.

 

Power Consumption:

BLE 5.1 has a significant advantage in power efficiency over UWB. It operates on low power levels, enabling devices to operate for extended periods on a single battery charge. UWB, on the other hand, consumes relatively more power due to its high-frequency transmissions. This makes BLE 5.1 an excellent choice for battery-powered devices, such as wearable trackers or IoT sensors.

 

Interoperability and Ecosystem:

BLE 5.1 benefits from its widespread adoption and compatibility with a vast range of devices and platforms. It leverages the existing Bluetooth infrastructure, making integration easier and cost-effective. UWB, although gaining traction, is still in the early stages of adoption and may require specialized hardware and infrastructure, limiting its interoperability with existing systems.

 

 


 

Conclusion

In conclusion, while the wide spectrum of UWB offers algorithm developers data points for sub-meter positioning, an intelligent BLE 5.1 implementation is also be able to achieve that as well.

At PenguinIN, we have succeeded in developing algorithms using BLE 5.1 to achieve sub-meter accuracy with confidence in typical enterprise and healthcare environment. It is our position that the BLE 5.1 and its eco-system offer a viable alternative to many of today’s real-time positioning solutions with unparalleled cost-effectiveness.

To learn more about our BLE 5.1 based development kit, products, and services, please reach out to us at [email protected]

CBAHI – Focus Areas and Solutions

 

CBAHI – Focus Areas and Solutions

Under the tight monitoring of the Central Board for Accreditation of Healthcare Institutes (CBAHI), Saudi Arabia is transforming and revolutionizing the healthcare standards across all medical and healthcare institutes to ensure alignment with the 2030 vision of the kingdom.

In the following article, we reflect on certain aspects of the CBAHI standards, and how PenguinIN can support you with not only complying but leveraging top-notch technology advancements to be ahead in your healthcare institute’s offerings quality and operational excellence.

 

Executive Roles & Duties:

The following criteria have been identified as KPIs for execs to focus on:

  • Ensuring the provision of medicines, equipment and the entire supply chain for the facility
  • Collaborating with all departments to elevate the quality of the facility’s work & environment
  • Constantly monitoring and evaluating the state of the facility building
  • Reducing the waste of the institute’s medical resources

Today’s technology help execs by automating monitoring and reporting on different aspects of their facilities and workforce. Being informed will help in better decision-making and response times. Whether it is to determine asset utilization, attendance compliance, facility upkeep or practitioner response time, collected allows execs to build ROI-driven decision-making. PenguinIN has the tools to help execs make informed decisions.

 

Infection control and Hand Hygiene:

Once again, CBAHI is bringing the attention of operators on the issue of hand hygiene by requiring

  • A multidisciplinary committee that provides oversight of the infection prevention and control program
  • Putting in place sterilization, disinfection and hand cleaning compliance procedures
  • Proper use of equipment and supplies to prevent infections and provide them adequately

The issue of hand hygiene has undoubtedly become central to any infection control program.
“A key use case that has tangible ROI is hand hygiene compliance. Being able to know who went where and when are keys to ensuring that compliance rules are adhered to”

Dr Mohammed Smadi, CEO of PenguinIN.

 

Through original research and strategic partnerships, PenguinIN has arrived at a cost-effective solution that is applicable to the retrofit scenario where existing dispenser can be upgraded to offer hand hygiene compliance at individual and ward levels.  Additional benefits include automating the workflow around dispenser replenishment and utilization.

 

Patient Experience & Safety:

Patient centricity is a key element in CBAHI.  Two key pillars are safety and experience. Putting what might be taken for granted in writing, CBAHI has highlighted the following points as drivers for patient safety:

  • The hospital must have a process to prevent wrong patients, wrong sites & and wrong surgery/procedure
  • The hospital has a process to ensure the correct identification of patients
  • Adding a layer of compliance and traceability reduces unintentional errors. PenguinIN allows for tracking patients and staff to schedule and physical areas to ensure that the entire flow and interactivity are captured in real-time and for historical review.

 

To improve patient experience, CHABI has required clear access and egress wayfinding for authorized hospital staff and availing wayfinding boards and enquiry points at entrances.

PenguinIN offers digital wayfinding with a customizable directory listing that is easy to upgrade in multiple languages with options to push infotainment messages which may be related to a particular patient (e.g. while waiting) or department.  In addition to offering a noticeable improvement in the patient experience, such solutions result in a meaningful reduction in missed appointments as well and can be tied with a patient reminder solution.

 

Medical Assets Supply & Tracking:

  • Provision of medical supplies by the healthcare facility management
  • Storing and stocking of medical supplies & equipment according to factory conditions & instructions
  • Regular inspection procedures from the healthcare facility management
  • Ensure the protection of medical supplies from theft or damage
  • Disposal of damaged & expired supplies
  • Reduce the waste of healthcare facility resources

 

Effective medical asset tracking and management are crucial for ensuring patient safety, reducing costs, complying with legal regulations, and improving the quality of patient care in the healthcare setting, hence, PenguinIN has special R&D activities on the family products of “PenTrack”, providing not only pin-point location of assets proximity of things but extends to featuring advanced AI Indoor analytics of data, defined business rules and trigger actions based on automatic detection of these specific conditions.

 

Dental Clinics standards updates:

  • The facility must activate the staff health and safety program
  • Immediate and consistent sanitation for doctors, nurses & medical equipment

Solutions developed by PenguinIN, including Duress Call solutions that ensure medical staff safety and security, and medical equipment asset tracking and monitoring are among our top-rated solutions, with solutions implementation ease, utilizing existing Wi-Fi network, and or using simple on-premises BLE/Bluetooth based solution.

 

Enhancing Operational Readiness

 

  • Neonatal tracking system (to protect against abduction)
  • Tracking the sterilization of medical equipment
  • Nurse tracking to support nurse calling systems and nurse safety
  • Equipment dwell times in dirty and clean rooms
  • System to support facility managers in tracking and scheduling maintenance for medical equipment

These are interesting technology evolution times, and PenguinIN is proud to be working with healthcare providers in Saudi Arabia to address these challenges.

To learn more about how PenguinIN can help your facility, reach out today at [email protected]

 

About PenguinIN 

PenguinIN is a leading indoor positioning and IoT use cases provider, headquartered in Irvine, California, with a regional office in Dubai. The company creates digital parallels for physical spaces to optimize day-to-day processes and create unique experiences for visitors and operators. PenguinIN leverages all available radio and sensor information to provide state-of-the-art indoor positioning information to build ROI-driven use cases, with solutions that have already been proven successful in some of the world’s most challenging environments.

About CBAHI
The Saudi Central Board for Accreditation of Healthcare Institutions (CBAHI) is the official agency authorized to grant accreditation certificates to all governmental and private healthcare facilities operating today in Saudi Arabia. CBAHI has emerged from the Saudi Health Council as a non-profit organization. The principal function of CBAHI is to set the healthcare quality and patient safety standards against which all healthcare facilities are evaluated for evidence of compliance.

 

(*) References:

  • Close QM.18, ESR Book, National Essential Safety Requirements by CBAHI.
  • Close QM.17, ESR Book, National Essential Safety Requirements by CBAHI.
  • Close IPC.4, ESR Book, National Essential Safety Requirements by CBAHI.
  • Twitter Official Account Announcements by CBAHI:
    https://twitter.com/Cbahi_SA

 

 

CBAHI – A Saudi Approach to Improved Healthcare

CBAHI – A Saudi Approach to Improved Healthcare

 

Saudi Arabia is transforming its healthcare sector through privatization under tight monitoring by the Saudi Central Board for Accreditation of Healthcare Institutes (CBAHI).

CBAHI aims to improve the patient, staff and visitor safety, service level and experience offered by all accredited institutes in the Kingdom. Additionally, it mandates the availability of tools to report errors during the service offering process.

PenguinIN has been refining its solutions to offer healthcare facilities solutions that help satisfy such accreditation requirements. Our solutions address:

 Preventing and Reporting Medical Errors and Improving Safety:

 Ensuring that surgery is always done at the right place

  • Giving a newborn to the correct parents
  • Newborn safety using electronic tagging immediately from birth
  • Ensuring compliance with infection control

 

Improving Patient Experience:

 Offering external and internal wayfinding signage to assist in wayfinding. This includes a navigate from home to clinic feature

  • Clear access and egress wayfinding for authorized hospital staff
  • Availability of wayfinding boards and enquiry points at entrances

 

Enhancing Operational Readiness:

  • Neonatal tracking system (to protect against abduction)
  • Tracking the sterilization of medical equipment
  • Nurse tracking to support nurse calling systems and nurse safety
  • Equipment dwell times in dirty and clean rooms
  • System to support facility managers in tracking and scheduling maintenance for medical equipment

These are interesting times and PenguinIN is proud to be working with healthcare providers in Saudi Arabia to address these challenges.
To learn more about how PenguinIN can help your facility, please send us an email to [email protected]

 

How Can Duress Call Solutions Help Create a Safer Healthcare Workplace?

How Can Duress Call Solutions Help Create a Safer Healthcare Workplace?

Due to incidents against nurses and frontline workers in the health sector, government authorities immediately responded to secure a safer work environment by initiating a dedicated law to address any abusive and violent behavior by patients or guests against medical staff, which was commendable. Such incidents are shocking particularly to the nursing community causing mental and psychological stress that they can do without.

As the frontline healthcare workers who are always putting us first in a time of need, we owe it to them to try and put regulations and systems in place to prevent such incidents from happening again.

The question is: is there a simple technology that can address this need specifically, and actually prevent any violent threats from escalating?

The answer is, yes; our RTLS Duress Solution – with just a press of a button – provides accurate real-time location information and easy-to-access duress buttons located directly on staff badges, allowing healthcare professionals to signal for help immediately from wherever they are, the location of the tag is also tracked to provide security personnel the exact location of the nurse when a duress call is made.

Such a simple yet creative solution that does not interfere with the workflow in a hospital may provide nurses with an additional sense of safety and show them that we indeed healthcare sector leaders do care.

To learn more about how PenguinIN can help healthcare staff and secure a safer environment for frontline healthcare workers, please reach out to [email protected]

 

Why & How Do Patients Choose a Hospital?

Why & How do Patients Choose a hospital?

Here’s a question for you: can you influence the patients’ choice of which hospital they attend to?

With the easily accessible medical and facility information online, patients are now more educated and informed about their choices and decisions. A 2017 UK study [1] has shown that convenient location continued to be a major influencing factor over hospital choice; however, other – perhaps less obvious – factors such as the number of beds and even parking spots are being viewed as a proxy for the level of service a hospital is likely to provide.

Information availability and patient freedom over healthcare provider choice drive private and public sectors to deliver a better overall patient experience. Albeit exciting from a patient perspective, it is challenging for operators to (1) identify areas of improvement which are rapidly and continuously evolving and (2) innovative and cost-effective ways to address these areas.

Creating key performance indicators (KPIs) for metrics that impact patient satisfaction and the corresponding tools to measure these KPIs should be a collaborative effort between the different departments. For example, IT managers who historically were responsible for the network and PC upkeep in hospitals, are now being asked to look after mobile applications and infrastructure specifically used to improve the patient experience.

In a 2018 survey [2] covering 1,000 healthcare consumers, it was found that the difficulty in finding one’s way around the hospital was worse of a challenge than poor communications from the doctor.  A solution addressing wayfinding within a hospital can span facility, IT, and patient experience departments.

In a Harvard Business Review article [3], it was shown that even though the average charge for an outpatient emergency room trip was $1,900 in 2016 (twice the average monthly rent for Americans), Patients who arrived at EDs with broken bones waited a painful 54 minutes, on average, before receiving any pain medication! The authors argue that hospitals’ waiting times should be measured and benchmarked against the national average waiting time. Hospitals that exhibit shorter waiting times than the average should be financially rewarded, while underperforming hospitals should be penalized. Such an initiative would involve finance, staff, legal, and patient advocacy teams.

It is our opinion that factors impacting the choice of healthcare provider are evolving in the digital era. Identifying and measuring KPIs is a cross-functional team effort with the ultimate objective of improving the overall patient experience and outcome.

PenguinIN is a healthcare digital transformation solution provider with patient experience solutions including PenNav: a best-in-class indoor wayfinding solution and PenTrack: a solution for asset and people tracking. Through analytics and business rules, PenguinIN works with facility managers, IT managers and patient experience directors to identify and resolve pain points in healthcare settings.

To learn more about what can help you achieve a better patient experience, or to share more thoughts, please reach out to us at [email protected]

 

[1] Patient choice modelling: how do patients choose their hospitals?  Available on: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28401405/
[2] 2018 Hospital Patient Survey Conducted by Scorpion.Co. Available on: https://www.scorpion.co/hospitals/expert-tips/intelligence/hospital-patient-survey-how-do-patients-choose-t/
[3] Harvard Business Review: To Reduce Emergency Room Wait Times, Tie Them to Payments by Nicos Savva and Tolga Tezcan. Available on: https://hbr.org/2019/02/to-reduce-emergency-room-wait-times-tie-them-to-payments