by
John W. Mitchell, Senior Correspondent | February 13, 2018
From the January/February 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
So we began tracking (wearable tracking via ultrasound exciters in the ceiling) those patients and the nurses caring for those patients – what were the interactions, how long was it taking to get from surgery to the unit and once they were on the unit, how long before they were physically getting up and walking as he recommended they do? He thought it should happen within four and six hours. We were able to track if that was really happening.
A patient is taken to the OR
HCB News: What did you find out?
AS: We actually found some really cool stuff. We found that the surgeon was spot on in terms of length of stay related to patients who got up within four hours of getting to the unit. There was an absolute correlation with their length of stay and how quickly they got up and started walking around post-surgery … and from a clinical outcomes perspective of getting out of the hospital sooner – which most patients want to do.
Overall the outcome quality for the patient was higher. We started to find some predictors of the experience of the patient related to their nurse/clinical time. Through the data we were able to find some very interesting relationships between how often a nurse entered the room on the day shift versus the night shift, how long they spent with the patient … things which, at the end of the day, could predict how happy that patient was with us.
So we found a sweet spot in terms of engagement of the nurse with the patient on different shifts as to how we would create the right experience for that patient to be happy with us on the satisfaction survey. This helped us to do some interesting work around the experience for the patient in terms of what they wanted, how to set expectations, how we educate the nursing team on how to interact with those patients depending on the hour of day so the patient would leave ultimately satisfied and taken care of as best as possible.
HCB News: Has Florida Hospital explored using similar analytics to improve workflow in other departments?
AS: We’re now also using this at one of our new NICU units and scaled it to all of our emergency room facilities across our Orlando system to primarily track staff duress and safety.
HCB News: What advice would you give to a hospital hoping to get started with unlocking deeper meaning from its RTLS/RFID data?
AS: Start with equipment. You learn a lot about your processes (or lack thereof), operational gaps and your infrastructure. It gives you a safe way to figure out if you have the right Wi-Fi, cabling and building infrastructure. That is the killer.
If you don't have the right processes to scale to staff and patient tracking, it will be a complete disaster. Starting with pumps and wheelchairs is a way to find out if you're ready. It's a good readiness assessment. At first we weren't ready. It took us years to be ready. But it was failure from a learning perspective, where we had to rethink things and approach them the right way.
Also, this has not been a very scalable model because it is very costly. Ultrasound exciters and cabling are extremely expensive and to put an ROI behind that is difficult to do. We've been working with Stanley to develop and engineer more efficient ways to deploy this type of technology.
It's hard to prioritize this over something else. Is it clinically critical? It is an additive for process improvement, so it’s sometimes hard to justify over other capital needs.
