The United States healthcare industry is projected to face a significant employee shortage, potentially reaching 100,000 by 2028. Certain specialties and regions are expected to be more severely impacted, particularly in New Jersey, New York, and Tennessee, where the demand for physicians and registered nurses is expected to outpace supply. This is only the beginning. The Association of American Medical Colleges reports there may be a shortage of up to 124,000 physicians by 2034. To mitigate this impending crisis, healthcare leaders must understand the challenges facing their teams and proactively intervene to lower burnout, enhance the well-being of healthcare professionals, and retain talent.
A recent survey revealed that frontline workers identify manual clinical documentation, lack of resources, and IT issues as the top challenges they’re experiencing. The Journal of General Internal Medicine found that physicians spend about 44% of their time on burdensome documentation, leaving them with only about 66% of their time available for patient interaction. When asked how healthcare leadership can help alleviate these challenges, the top answers included streamlining and automating more manual processes. Modern location technologies such as Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) offer promising solutions to enhance operational efficiencies. By implementing these innovations, healthcare organizations can free up valuable time for clinicians, allowing them to focus more on direct patient care and improving overall healthcare delivery.
At the end of the day, clinicians want to spend more time on patient care. Increased connection with patients has been shown to significantly enhance clinician satisfaction and well-being, as healthcare professionals want to know they’re making a positive impact. Technology plays a crucial role in achieving this goal. The most successful implementations of RTLS deliver benefits on both sides of the equation — they create value and better outcomes for the patient and family, while also making the clinician’s job more efficient and enjoyable by reallocating time back to patient care.
Leverage RTLS Technologies to Reduce Staff Burnout
While patients are, of course, top of mind, healthcare leadership must also prioritize the well-being and safety of their staff and caregivers. In recent years, the Triple Aim, which traditionally focused on enhancing the patient experience, improving population health, and lowering costs, has evolved to include the clinician’s well-being. The challenges faced in recent years have consistently demonstrated the detrimental effects of clinician burnout and workplace violence and the corresponding negative impact on outcomes, retention, experiences, and costs. By addressing clinician burnout and focusing on greater safety, organizations can create a more supportive environment that ultimately benefits both healthcare professionals and the patients they serve.
The IoT technology and location sensors behind RTLS technology feature active-radio frequency identification (RFID) wearable badges and tags to provide immediate, comprehensive enterprise visibility for the precise location of equipment, colleagues, or patients. Once an RTLS solution is implemented or scaled, the equipment tags and staff badges enable healthcare organizations to optimize real-time insights to adequately staff departments according to the busiest windows, respond quickly to any staff duress alerts, enhance temperature monitoring with automated logs, and improve patient response times using nurse call automation.
Using an advanced RTLS workflow platform can play a major role in reducing non-clinical manual tasks by offering automatic patient status updates, estimated wait times, and staff views on display boards that give an easy-to-read layout of each patient’s journey. Facility leaders can leverage the wide range of real-time data provided by RTLS to map out the expected operations, assess whether these expectations are correct, and then accurately address bottlenecks to reduce the burdens shouldered by their healthcare teams.
Leverage RTLS Technologies to Manage Assets
Enabling staff with fundamental asset visibility is a crucial step toward achieving an operationally efficient healthcare environment. It has been reported that one-third of nurses spend at least one hour during an average shift searching for equipment. Knowing the location of essential mobile medical equipment (MME) significantly reduces the time staff spend looking for equipment, facilitating faster patient care.
Ensuring all MME is in stock, clean, and readily available is critical to delivering timely and efficient care. Healthcare facilities can scale their existing RTLS solution to offer asset tracking with room-level locating and enhance workflows such as Periodic Automatic Replacement (PAR) level management, preventative maintenance management functions, and equipment distribution. RTLS can notify clinical support staff when adequate PAR levels are at risk and trigger automated workflows for replenishment orders. The data provided by asset management effectively addresses equipment distribution and maintenance challenges. Hospital administrators and other key personnel can utilize historical data and robust analytics to increase equipment utilization, prevent over-purchasing, and reduce rental costs.
Leverage RTLS Technologies to Digitally Navigate
As healthcare staff desire increased visibility within healthcare facilities, so do patients. Visits to hospitals and healthcare facilities can often be overwhelming, so optimizing the patient journey must begin at the outset. Providing clear guidance and easy navigation is essential to enhance the overall experience and reduce anxiety for patients. Digital wayfinding and interactive campus maps offer user-friendly indoor and outdoor navigation that efficiently guides users to their destinations, providing patients and visitors with the digital amenities they’re used to in their daily lives. These GPS-like solutions address an immediate need with a familiar approach that is easy for facilities to implement and provide interactive maps for use on mobile applications or web pages.
Advanced wayfinding platforms provide a comprehensive patient-centric solution, including integrations with electronic health records (EHR) for real-time appointment reminders via email, SMS, or patient portals with directions for parking, navigation, points-of-interest, and custom routing. Facility decision-makers can then view real-time data on the most visited or searched locations, gaining insights to further enhance the user experience.
These RTLS tools help reduce patient anxiety and significantly increase the chances of on-time arrivals for appointments. Studies have shown that patients are more likely to attend scheduled appointments when they receive navigational assistance, which leads to better health outcomes. On the provider side, delayed appointments slow the planned schedule and create inefficiencies, which can decrease patient outcomes and reduce HCAHPS scores. U.S. hospitals collectively lose $150 billion each year due to missed appointments. Ensuring patients feel at ease reduces late arrivals or missed visits and helps drive better results for patients, staff, and the healthcare organization.
Leverage Scalability and Customization to Fit Everyone’s Needs
By partnering with a strategic solution provider that offers an advanced suite of RTLS use cases and various locating capabilities, teams can future-proof their investment, and seamlessly scale to new use cases as necessary. A clinical-grade RTLS with built-in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology offers hybrid architecture that can significantly boost efficiency for organizations aiming to balance precise location monitoring and patient care with cost-effectiveness and staff support. A system that can switch between BLE and other, more precise, location offerings enables healthcare facilities to utilize a cost-effective mixed RTLS infrastructure within a single department or across an entire hospital campus as necessary.
As healthcare decision-makers seek to offer value propositions throughout their facilities, they must consider location technologies that improve outcomes for the patient and family, while also making the clinician’s job more efficient and satisfying.
Caryn Hewitt
Caryn Hewitt, Senior Director, Consulting Services atCenTrak.
