Orlando-based Florida Hospital installed surgical real-time location systems to quickly assess patient and facility status in 2013 and has since seen immediate improvements.
Those quick benefits include faster “turnaround time for different process portions of an OR," said Ashley Simmons, Florida Hospital's director of innovation development. Simmons cited examples such as more accurate on-time starts, room turnover, and better estimates of how long patients have to stay in recovery post-op.
"There were no real time solutions in place before this one," Simmons said. To create its system, Florida Hospital essentially rolled together Wi-Fi-enabled patient wristbands, ultrasound exciters, and visual dashboards to bring the visualization of surgical logistics out from a complete "black box" situation to one of what Simmons called profound clarity.
While hospital executives estimated a five-year ROI track, Simmons explained that early results are showing the aforementioned quantifiable payoffs as well as improved staff morale.
Simmons will be presenting about the hospital's experience with the platform in "Improved OR Patient Flow Through RTLS-Based Visual Analytics," at HIMSS16 in Las Vegas beginning in late February.
Real-time location systems have carved out well-defined niches in asset management, staff workflow evaluation, and environmental monitoring.
"The technology is something you can automate with the exciters and the tags where you don't have to rely on a physician or a nurse to push a button or check something in the system or document something," Simmons said. "You can automate it to a degree where it's just happening. That's what we needed. We didn't want to keep adding stuff to the nurses' role or to anybody on the clinical care team."
The platform does, however, enable clinical staff to elaborate on the raw data the system captures.
"They can document when something goes wrong so we can capture that information to know what happened and dive deeper into how we improve it," Simmons explained. "The data can tell you a lot of things, but it can't always tell you what caused a delay or a situation."
Simmons said the system's flexibility allayed fears that it was another piece of "process improvement" technology that would reduce autonomy.
"It gave them a voice to justify some of what they had been doing that they hadn't had before," she said. "That was kind of cool because we didn't think about it that way. It really became a voice for them and a tool that they could use to improve their own processes and take it and run with it. That came about a lot faster than I ever thought would happen."
She also said the technology could be deployed by a large range of hospitals.
"Unless you are truly financially at a place where you have no additional capital of any kind and are struggling to break even,” Simmons said, “any size community hospital or large system would benefit from the technology."
Simmons will be presenting "Improved OR Patient Flow Through RTLS-Based Visual Analytics" March 1 from 2:30 - 3:30 p.m. at the Sands Expo Convention Center Palazzo E.
