By Kayla Matthews, HealthIT writer and technology enthusiast, Tech Blog
Twitter:Â @ProductiBytes
Hospitals and other health care facilities are a hive of activity, filled with busy worker bees in the form of the doctors and nurses that save lives every single day.
While these medical professionals do their best to keep track of everything and everyone, sometimes it can be difficult to keep things straight. The use of RIFD trackers has helped make it easier, but real-time location systems could potentially change the future of health care.
What Are Real-Time Location Systems?
A real-time location system, or RTLS, is a tool that enables individuals and equipment to be located, as the name suggests, in real time. It works a lot like your phone’s GPS — if you’ve ever used Google Maps to find your way to a new location, you have a basic idea of how RTLS works. The only difference is that RTLS is designed to be used indoors. What does this technology mean for the future of health care?
Tracking Equipment
Equipment, especially large equipment, is always on the move in health care settings — it’s simply not possible to have multiple versions of every piece of equipment in every room. Not only would they take up far too much space, but purchasing all of this equipment would also be extremely cost prohibitive. While the equipment might be mobile, keeping track of it can become a problem.
Utilizing RTLS means that you could easily pinpoint the location of a necessary piece of equipment. You can even narrow the equipment’s location down to the square foot if necessary, making it easier to keep track of all the essential equipment you might need on a moment’s notice.
Tracking Medical Professionals
If you’ve ever been to a hospital, either as a patient or as a visitor, you’ve probably heard doctors, nurses and specialists being paged over the intercom for various duties throughout the facility. While it does work, it isn’t the most efficient way to keep people apprised of their ever-changing responsibilities.
RTLS programs can keep track of professionals as long as they’re inside the building. When paired with a secure messaging system, they could even be used to communicate with doctors to inform them about a patient’s situation.
While not strictly necessary in slower-paced departments, in places like the emergency room where patient situations can change at a moment’s notice, being able to quickly locate the nearest doctor or surgeon could mean the difference between life and death.
Tracking Patients
For the most part, patients stay where they are told, but there are some cases where it becomes necessary to keep careful track of a patient’s movements. One prime example would be patients who suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. These patients in particular could wander away without even realizing it.
RTLS could be incorporated into the wristbands or badges assigned to these patients to enable medical professionals to keep track of patients’ locations. They could even be programmed to provide an alert to the monitoring professionals if the patients leave their assigned area.
Patient tracking isn’t as accurate as other forms of real-time tracking, but it still enables doctors to keep track of their patients, be alerted if their patients have left an assigned area and even be alerted if the patient falls.
Real-time location systems are still a long way off from being adopted universally in the health care field, but these tools could allow professionals in all fields to make the most of their time and enable them to take the best care of their patients.
Whether you need to find a crash cart that’s gone missing or a doctor who might be taking a nap in the break room, real-time location systems could easily change the face of health care in the coming years.