How a real-time locating system can work for you
How a real-time locating system can work for you
Eliminating the hunt and find
When two-time recipient of Most Wired's Innovator award Columbus Regional Hospital decided to move toward real-time locating. While IT staff at the 225-bed hospital did not want to add to the workflow of an already busy clinical staff, they did want to offer real-time information on where staff were located, and they were able to do it.
First, Veronica Kagley, technology coordinator, facilities, went to the hospital's staff to see what they wanted from an RFID system, asking, "What's the item that's going to most make you want to use this?" And the nurses told her they wanted to eliminate the "hunt and find" because there were a lot of areas staff could be hidden — behind a door in a patient's room, in the staff lounge working on reports. Getting to the headwall, Kagley says, was logistically a huge challenge for nurses.
"So by incorporating the RFID, when that nurse walks into a room, the system recognizes No. 1 that she is there and No. 2 what her level is. So it automatically cancels the call because it knows a nurse is there and the concern is being addressed," Kagley says.
"That was probably the biggest seller for our nursing staff — not having to fight through equipment, furniture, families to get to that wall."
With the nurse identification system, a white board display is visible not only in patient rooms but in hallways, with HIPAA-compliant data, Kagley says. Looking down the hall, lights above patients' rooms indicate what type of nurse call is being made — green indicates an RN, amber an LPN, and orange means a care partner. All nurses had to do differently was wear a personnel badge high up on the body.
Equipment tagged for real-time location
Once they got their feet wet with real-time location for nurses, which "barely touched on [all of the] capabilities of RFID," Kagley says, IT turned to equipment location. Every piece of equipment throughout the house that either had a high turnover rate, a high walk rate, or a high dollar weight was tagged, and badges were used to communicate that information to the RFID's sensory network. Deploying the software throughout the nursing unit, dedicated PCs were set up to show the location of the desired piece of equipment. Nurses can enter the ID number of the equipment, the badge number, a generic description or they can do a search and find. "Now that was very handy for the nursing staff to keep up with where the equipment was, to not have to search all over the unit to find it," she says.
The group that benefitted the most, though, was the clinical engineering or biomed department, she says. This small department is responsible for thousands of pieces of equipment and routine maintenance; "the ability to be able to find those pieces of equipment very efficiently increased their productivity and allowed them to be able to achieve an almost 100% completion of all monthly preventive maintenance procedures, which was almost a 50% increase over what they were doing prior to launching that," Kagley says. Once they were confident about using real-time location with equipment on the nursing floors, IT went housewide with it.
Using RFID in the ED
The next step was moving the RFID system to the emergency department, which had approached IT about using the program to calculate how long it took "specific pieces of a patient's visit to occur." One thing the department wanted was to decrease how long patients sat in an exam room before they were seen by a provider and retain those patients who left the hospital due to the frustration of waiting for a clinician.
"We created the ability for the system to send a 15-minute warning to the patient care coordinator who ran the unit to let them know the patient has been present in this room for 15 minutes and a nurse hasn't been in to see them, which is very powerful," Kagley says.
"Our patient satisfaction scores went up exponentially after we implemented that process because they knew someone was going to pay attention to them, they knew they were there," she says.
Scripting was done so that when patients were admitted to the ED, they knew why they were wearing the identification badge, "which gave the patient a lot more confidence that we were going to see them," Kagley says. The badge provides location information for the patient from admit to discharge.
Six months after implementation, rates for both waiting room length and overall length of stay decreased "significantly," she adds. And those that "fell through the cracks" before, patients who left the hospital without being seen, she estimates at being about 3% pre-implementation. Post-implementation that number was halved. "That's money walking out of the door," Kagley says. "And any time you can keep that from happening, you've achieved something."
For those looking to implement an RFID system, Kagley recommends using a validation process on a routine basis and defining those up front and that before launch training programs are focused on providing uniform knowledge to the staff using it. "And I think probably the other reason we've had the success that we've had is because we have a dedicated body. Me. You really need to have that dedication, that general ombudsman that can be the one that is the go-to person when there are problems, to be the troubleshooter and resolve it but also someone to monitor and make sure everything is working as it should. And if there are changes to made, to be able to communicate what the need is, to be able to go to the right people to make that change and implement it."
Kathy Wallace, RHIA, director, medical quality management, attributes the success to the inclusion of staff, both prior to and after implementation. "If you're just adding something that complicates the day on the floor, then you're going to have problems," she says. "You have to be solving a problem and not just installing something for the sake of installing something."
When two-time recipient of Most Wired's Innovator award Columbus Regional Hospital decided to move toward real-time locating. While IT staff at the 225-bed hospital did not want to add to the workflow of an already busy clinical staff, they did want to offer real-time information on where staff were located, and they were able to do it.Subscribe Now for Access
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