
How to Reduce Costs via RTLS Asset Tracking in Hospitals?
How RTLS Data Improves Practice Management & Efficiencies
Why should clinic administrators and healthcare leaders use RTLS?
Their primary goals likely include enhancing patient access, improving throughput, optimizing resources, delivering exceptional care, and achieving top-tier customer satisfaction. While meeting one of these goals is impressive, achieving all simultaneously is more complex, requiring a balanced, multifaceted approach.
Constraints like exam room capacity, staffing, and bottlenecks often limit patient throughput. RTLS offers real-time visibility into operations, allowing immediate issue resolution before problems escalate.
An RTLS-driven patient flow system would be incredibly beneficial, offering unlimited potential to enhance operations and solve recurring issues effectively.
How can RTLS help with reducing variability in the patient’s experience?
Healthcare leaders often struggle with providing a consistent experience for every patient at every visit. Achieving this requires staff to operate uniformly, delivering consistent quality care within a set timeframe.
RTLS offers accurate, real-time, and historical data on various metrics, such as time spent with patients, unattended times in exam rooms, staff-patient interactions, and overall visit durations. Identifying and addressing inconsistencies in these areas ensures efficient and high-quality care. For example, if a nurse deviates from the average interaction time, RTLS highlights this for coaching, not penalization. This approach has proven effective in many clinics, helping managers address performance issues and refine standard operating procedures (SOPs).
Understanding these metrics through RTLS can significantly aid in creating or revamping SOPs, such as determining the reasonable time for a CMA to take a patient’s vitals.

How RTLS-based patient flow can assist in driving patient throughput?
RTLS offers unparalleled real-time visibility and awareness, crucial for enhancing patient care and experience. Though it can be overwhelming, the insights it provides are invaluable.
Consider a typical clinic visit:
Registration:
- Visibility: Leaders can monitor traditional waiting times and registration processing durations.
- Action: Utilize real-time stats or desktop displays to identify bottlenecks quickly.
Waiting Room:
- Visibility: Track patient wait times before being called to the clinic.
- Action: Leaders can see current and traditional wait times, identify the longest and shortest waits, and understand top-performing providers or appointment types to apply best practices across the board.
Vitals Station:
- Visibility: Monitor bottlenecks at vitals stations, usage patterns of certain stations, and equipment sufficiency.
- Action: Ensure efficient processing of patient load by balancing station use and equipment availability.
Exam Room:
- Visibility: Track the nurse’s or medical assistant’s interaction times with patients, medication reconciliation, and any additional vitals or tests.
- Action: Identify providers with varying wait times and performance issues, addressing inefficiencies such as overly detailed consultations or attempts to cover too many issues in one visit.
Provider Interaction:
- Visibility: Monitor provider-patient interaction times, identifying inefficiencies and areas for improvement.
- Action: Adjust appointment schedules or coach providers on efficiency to ensure timely patient care.
Real-Time Decision-Making:
- Visibility: Immediate insights into patient flow and resource usage.
- Action: Make better in-the-moment decisions, such as knowing which patient should be seen next and prepping exam rooms for the next patient.
RTLS data helps healthcare leaders make informed decisions, improving resource allocation, patient satisfaction, and overall efficiency. This real-time visibility transforms patient flow management, ensuring a consistent and high-quality experience for every patient at every visit.
How else can RTLS data improve patient flow?
The possibilities are endless. Identifying trends is crucial for success, as positive changes to processes rely on understanding the root causes of problems.
RTLS software provides data for quick visual analysis using heat maps, which highlight busy times and areas where capacity exceeds demand. Comparing heat maps over time helps determine the impact of process changes, aiming to level out daily volume peaks and valleys.
For example, analyzing wait times by hour or service line helps pinpoint delays. As an operational leader, I closely monitored deviations between scheduling and actual operations. Heat maps illustrating bottlenecks are invaluable, often revealing outliers caused by not following standard procedures. RTLS data enables drilling down to specific details, facilitating quick fixes through meetings or additional staff training.


Conclusion
The closer we can match patient expectations regarding visit start time or the time they spend with the provider during the visit, the more satisfied patients are. By leveraging an RTLS-enabled patient flow solution you can make your patient experience more consistent and reproducible, and that adds value to patient visits. In addition, it also simplifies the work of nurses and doctors, which in turn impacts staff satisfaction and allows them more time with patients, so it is a win-win situation.