by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | February 28, 2017
From the January 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Versus Technology provides RTLS solutions for patient flow, asset management and safety. In the last several years, the company has been pushing into the outpatient setting and also helping its clients use the information to create better workflows. Versus clients have been using the company’s Advantages Clinic patient flow system for what it calls “self rooming,” says Charles Springsteen, a product manager at Versus Technology. To use the system, the patient clips a locating badge on their shirt and proceeds to the assigned exam room. When the patient has arrived in the exam room, the system sends notifications to staff that the patient is ready to be seen. One client using the platform, Virginia Mason Hospital & Medical Center in Seattle, used much of its unused waiting area to build new exam rooms, Springsteen says. New last year, Versus — which was acquired by Midmark Corporation in May 2016 — is providing consulting services through its Performance Improvement Consulting division. The division can help facilities redesign workflows based on LEAN/Six Sigma management practices. “We’re going beyond software,” Springsteen says.
VIZZIA Technologies
VIZZIA Technologies serves as a bridge between the hospital and RTLS/RFID providers by consulting with facilities to make sure they purchase the appropriate products, and helping them deploy and manage the systems, with the goal of building the proper internal processes to achieve a return on investment, says Andrew Halasz, the company’s president and chief executive officer. “It’s all about getting the value out of the technologies deployed,” Halasz says. A hospital can hire VIZZIA to use the data from the RTLS/RFIDsystems to reduce the need for rental equipment and improve the availability of equipment for nurses, so they don’t have to waste time searching for and cleaning equipment. The company recently added an environmental monitoring help desk. Halasz says the product eliminates the need for hospital staff to enter the root-cause/corrective actions taken when alerts are triggered by sensors that indicate the temperature of a refrigerator or freezer has gone out of range. “This eliminates the need for staff to learn new software and how to navigate to the right screens in order to comply with this important regulatory requirement,” Halasz says.
Zebra Technologies
Zebra Technologies provides RTLS hardware solutions for a number of industries, including health care, with 30 health care RTLS applications that employ a variety of technologies, including Wi-Fi, BLE and GPS. Looking to the future, Zebra is harnessing a growing trend of using data to promote change in an automated way. The company has in the pipeline some proprietary software with algorithms that provide a “smoothing of the data,” says Chris Sullivan, Zebra’s Global Healthcare practice lead. “We’re going towards taking data and bringing operational intelligence and pattern recognition,” Sullivan says. Zebra will have customers live with a middleware system in mid-2017.
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