The Healthcare Delivery Revolution Is Here: A New Approach to Coordinating Care Operations and Clinical Workflows

As healthcare systems continue to struggle with reimbursement against operational costs, they are looking for innovative ways to narrow that gap. This is challenging for many reasons, including: higher interest rates, a 20% increase in labor costs, and inefficient processes. In 2022, the median operating margin for U.S. hospitals was actually a loss of 3.8% and the average operating margin was a loss of 13.5%.

Currently, healthcare leadership may not have a holistic view of their operational workflows, patient journeys, or staffing and resource management. The data may be siloed, often within legacy systems from disparate vendors. But now there’s a solution.

The New RTLS

Forget what you know about real-time location systems (RTLS) and antiquated vendors with disruptive installations, cumbersome training requirements, and convoluted dashboards. There’s a revolution happening in RTLS for healthcare and the systems that are taking advantage of this are seeing significant business impact and a return on investment within months.

Of course, there’s the initial and often immediate financial impact of RTLS asset tracking: knowing the location of costly medical equipment eliminates time spent searching for the equipment. After all, time saved is money saved. Plus, inexpensive and long-lasting Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags and beacons paired with an off-prem cloud platform means that the financial benefits only continue to increase.

Advancements in RTLS and AI now give healthcare systems the ability to coordinate care operations and clinical workflows. This new level of data-driven automation and efficiency holds the potential for revolutionizing healthcare delivery in many ways, including:

• Increased staff satisfaction because the ability to locate needed equipment is more efficient, ready, and available
• Shared resources among departments increase utilization, save money, and improve outcomes
• Quicker bed turnaround times because of process automation and forecasted resource allocation can increase capacity
• Improved patient experience with more efficient staff-to-patient ratio and patient bedside time allocation 
• Improved patient outcomes by integrating EHR records into the operational context to tailor care to individuals

Healthcare delivery is now positioned to evolve and digitally transform to shifting demands of the market and patient expectations. Other industries have already made dramatic leaps in how they operate with added layers of new and emerging technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The Unknown Patient Journey

For example, let’s look at the user journey on a consumer website, or even a hospital’s website. As soon as that user logs onto the site, the marketing team immediately knows everything there is to know about that user. They know what videos you watched and for how long. They know what links you hovered over and did not click. And in just minutes, that entire digital journey is captured, analyzed, and often followed up with automated outreach.

The average inpatient spends 4.6 days in the hospital and yet healthcare systems may not have a holistic view of the patient journey. The data that they do have upon discharge is often siloed and disparate, trapped in systems that rarely communicate with each other, making it nearly impossible to connect the dots in a way that delivers actionable insights.

But now, we have large language models, talking computers, and even self-driving cars. And all of these advancements have one thing in common: they make recommendations and take action based on aggregating and analyzing data.

Understanding the Three Pillars of Care Delivery

This is where Kontakt.io comes into the picture: creating a foundation layer that collects data about the position, motion, and interactions of patients, staff, and medical equipment. And by utilizing how these three pillars of care delivery – staff, medical equipment, and clinical space – expand and contract around the patient’s journey, hospital systems can better orchestrate resources and processes. 

The current misalignment between data and care delivery is at the center of healthcare’s digital transformation. This is the new path: Generate and collect this foundational data, gain an understanding of how everything moves and interacts, and leverage AI to build workflows, spot bottlenecks, and get actionable recommendations to make a day in the life of a patient, a nurse, a biomed operator, and a patient transporter a little bit better.

Imagine a win-win-win scenario: staff have better workflows and healthcare systems save money. Plus, we may even see improved patient outcomes as a result. The fact is that coordinating care operations and clinical workflows with data-driven automation and efficiencies will revolutionize healthcare delivery in ways we cannot even imagine right now. We don’t know what we don’t know. But what we do know is that healthcare’s opportunity to transform data into a positive impact is finally here.