A Business Case to Make Your Nurse Call System More Efficient with RTLS

6/17/2024

Every second counts in healthcare. This pressure couldn’t be more felt as patient volumes rise and staffing shortages and burnout continue.

Nurse call systems are used to keep patients and staff more connected, escalating patient needs to care teams. This critical communication tool also introduces an often frustrating, repetitive task into the care team’s daily routine—the cancel button.

When a nurse steps inside a patient’s room, their goal is to attend to the patient, especially in critical situations. Pressing the cancel button on the wall (sometimes inconveniently placed or surrounded by patient care equipment) may not be the first priority. And when they do have a chance to cancel the call, it may be after the next step in the care experience has been completed. Reporting metrics for call response times could then be skewed, making informed improvement decisions difficult.

This presents a critical opportunity within hospital environments: automating foundational nurse call systems to improve workflow.

Why Automate Nurse Call with RTLS

Real-time locating systems (RTLS) leverage technology to optimize nurse call systems. Staff wear an RTLS badge, attached to their standard ID badge, that sends location signals to sensors throughout the facility. Precise room- or bed-level location data is integrated into nurse call systems—when a nurse enters a room, the nurse call system can automatically clear the call, allowing the nurse to focus immediately on patient care while removing a potentially frustrating, repetitive task from nurse workflow. The nurse call system also displays staff location—in software or with dome lights —giving nurse managers an at-a-glance status of unit staffing.

At the same time, this location data is used to provide data on patient care, shedding light on time at the bedside, rounding activities and more.

With RTLS, the main focus is no longer on the cancel button; it’s on providing quality patient care. The benefits of automating nurse call with RTLS include:

• Patient-Centric Focus: Prioritize patients, not call cancellation by automatically clearing calls upon clinical staff presence.
• Accurate Response Times: Report patient call responses immediately and automatically, eliminating manual data entry and providing accurate, unbiased data for patient satisfaction and safety initiatives.
• Documented Patient Care: Know how long your staff spends at the bedside to inform staffing strategies and resource allocation.
• Informed Unit Status: Communicate the location of clinical staff and which patients are waiting for assistance with hallway call lights.
• Safer, More Hygienic Environment: Reduce potential touchpoints for germs to spread when no longer requiring a manual button press in patient rooms.

Empowering Healthcare with RTLS

Automating nurse call systems with RTLS is foundational for hospitals seeking to reduce the daily burden on nursing staff while enhancing patient care and operational efficiency.

For more than 30 years, CareFlow™ RTLS has been automating nurse call systems. Built and designed with healthcare in mind, CareFlow RTLS is a comprehensive platform delivering precise location information to help guide healthcare operations.

Automating nurse call is a strategic starting point for introducing RTLS, which can be scaled over time to other location-based use cases, such as asset tracking, staff duress and more, including interfaces to patient engagement systems and digital white boards. With CareFlow RTLS, healthcare leaders can get the most value out of their locating system while prioritizing efficiency—and ultimately patient care.

Learn more about how CareFlow RTLS enhances nurse call systems and available nurse call system interfaces here, and all CareFlow RTLS solutions at CareFlowRTLS.com.