How to Prepare for RTLS in the Year Ahead

Care needs are increasing across the healthcare spectrum. Patients are demanding increased access, putting staff in the hot seat to manage the influx. Additionally, burnout and staff shortages are rising, further exacerbating the workload of remaining caregivers. As a result, health systems must become more efficient to meet demand, while maintaining or increasing both the quality and safety of care.  

Advancements in technologies can help meet these pressures, including the use of real-time locating systems. However, planning a technology investment as large as RTLS requires thorough research. Here’s your guide to getting started with RTLS. 

What is RTLS? 

A real-time locating system (RTLS) is deployed in your indoor space to automatically identify where people and equipment are in real time. 

How does RTLS work?  

RTLS combines badges, tags, sensors and software to communicate location data. 

• Patient + Staff Badges: Patients and staff wear RTLS badges that emit locating signals, communicating real-time data to sensors throughout the facility. 

• Asset Tags: These are just like badges, but asset tags are affixed to IV pumps, ECGs, wheelchairs and other mobile equipment.  

• Sensory Network: Wired, battery-powered or plug-in sensors throughout the facility receive badge and tag signals and communicate location data to the software.  

• Software Solutions: Location data are displayed in real time on workstation computers or large screen displays to provide simple, yet powerful visibility to who and what is where. Advanced RTLS applications use location data to provide alerts and prompts that cue caregivers and other healthcare staff to automate location-based workflows. 

What healthcare challenges does RTLS solve? 

Hospitals, clinics and other facilities are under intense pressure to improve processes for better care experiences.  

• Acute care: Hospital staff have one of the most grueling healthcare jobs. Whether it’s facing a dynamic emergency room environment or workplace violence events, staff are feeling burned out or leaving the workforce altogether.  

  RTLS helps create a safer environment for staff, while providing a clear picture of location data in real time that improves operations and the care experience.   

• Oncology care: More than 2 million American cancer diagnoses were estimated last year. Given its sensitive and critical nature, coordinating care for this growing population requires timely yet safe processes.  

  RTLS empowers clinical staff to focus on patient care, not logistics. Patients, staff and equipment are tracked in real time, offering insights into workflows and prompting next steps in the care experience.  

• Outpatient care: As patients demand increased access to outpatient services, both clinical staff and physicians are stretched thin, experiencing burnout and being challenged to see as many patients as possible without sacrificing quality.   

  RTLS can help optimize how patients, staff and equipment flow through the outpatient clinic, leveraging key performance indicators (KPIs) that can improve workflows. 

How can RTLS be used to benefit healthcare?  

• Nurse Call Automation  

  Nurses are at the heart of healthcare. Simplifying their routines and empowering them to focus on patient care, not data entry, can help keep them satisfied in the job they signed up for. Automating your nurse call system with RTLS is a significant step toward lightening the nurse workload. When a nurse enters the room, the nurse call system uses RTLS location data to automatically cancel the call, eliminating the need to manually reach for the call button on the wall and allowing caregivers to go straight to patient care. RTLS also enables automatic documentation of response times, so healthcare leaders can improve patient experiences, safety and staffing strategies. 

• Staff Duress 

  Workplace violence against caregivers is not a matter of if but when. Health systems who cultivate a safe environment and culture can help instill confidence in staff that their safety is a priority. When staff feel safe, they are happier. When they are happier, they can provide better quality care. RTLS steps up your safety game by allowing staff to quickly and discreetly send alerts to responders when in a threatening situation using a mobile duress button. RTLS-powered staff duress is built into the badges staff wear for automating nurse call, making it an embedded component of their daily workflow. The alerts and security response times are automatically recorded to help leaders assess staffing and overall effectiveness of their safety program.  

• Asset Tracking 

  Safe, timely and effective care can be jeopardized when nursing staff and biomedical teams spend thousands of hours per year searching for equipment needed for patient care. This non-value-added time leads to over-purchasing of assets and lower patient satisfactions scores for the health system. Leveraging RTLS for asset tracking allows biomedical and nursing teams to reliably locate and manage assets in real time, from highly mobile to easily lost items. Nurses can spend more time at the bedside and less time walking the halls, while biomedical staff can organize a structured, cost-effective routine for locating assets in need of maintenance.  

• Patient Flow 

  Creating a timely and safe care experience is more important than ever, as increased care needs—outpatient to acute—are growing exponentially despite setbacks in staff retention and a lack of operational data. The bread and butter of RTLS lies in automating patient and staff workflows—from room assignments to equipment locations to provider interactions. Automating your workflow with RTLS keeps care teams in sync, while providing accurate and insightful data for process improvement to increase throughput and design a better patient-caregiver experience. 

• Analytics  

  A successful healthcare organization relies on accurate and timely information, though it’s often challenging to collect and measure. RTLS can play a key role in this equation with automatically documented KPIs based on your facility’s day-to-day operations. Consider metrics like patient alone time, patient time with provider and space utilization. RTLS is the gateway to having knowledge into these KPIs, empowering organizations with meaningful and actionable information to optimize workflows and resources.  

Which locating technology should I use? 

There are a wide variety of real-time locating systems, each using a different technology (or using it in a different way), yielding different results in location precision. How do you know which technology is right for you? Your locating goals determine your approach. Do you want to locate people, equipment or both? With your goal in mind, you can identify the level of locating precision needed. Here is a run-down of different technologies used for locating in healthcare: 

• Infrared: Bound by walls, infrared (IR) is an invisible form of light that provides highly precise location data within one meter, locating badges and tags to the room, bed and chair-level. IR is the same safe signaling technology used in your TV remote control. As a form of light, it can't be covered or blocked from reaching the sensor or IR receiver. For automating workflows, including both people and equipment, IR is the gold standard in locating technology. However, the accuracy of IR comes with a trade-off. The wired or battery-powered IR sensors placed throughout the facility can equate to a substantial investment.  

  Because of its dependable accuracy, multiple RTLS vendors use IR for locating. But it's important to note they use it in different ways. In some systems, the badge or tag emits IR, and it's received by a sensor. In other systems, that paradigm is reversed—a device placed in the room emits IR and the badge or tag receives it. While there are pros and cons to each of these methods, higher accuracy can be obtained with fewer in-room devices when the badge or tag emits IR. 

• Ultrasound and Ultra-Wideband: These technologies emit high-frequency sound or radio waves to indicate a locating signal. While these technologies can be highly accurate, cost is again a factor, often outpacing IR in the level of investment. 

• Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE): BLE locating technology is one of the newer RTLS technologies on the market. It's often inexpensive to install, and due to an open standard, is beginning to proliferate across various devices and systems used in healthcare. Accuracy is typically at the near-room level, ranging within three meters, making it a good fit for use cases where a near-room general location will suffice, like determining where a piece of equipment is or where a staff duress call is placed from. However, when it comes to automating workflow, such as cancelling a call when a nurse enters the room, BLE accuracy isn’t yet room certain, so it may cancel the call in the room next door. BLE can be deployed in several ways. One, over Wi-Fi networks with access points capable of receiving BLE. Two, over dedicated networks of Bluetooth sensors placed throughout the facility, usually plugged into outlets for easy installation. Or three, through a combination of both. 

• Hybrid Technology: These deployments leverage both near-room BLE locating as well as precise, room-level locating with technologies such as IR. BLE is used as a cost-effective way to deploy RTLS facility wide, while IR can deliver room-certain precision in specific areas where it’s needed most, namely patient care areas.  

What are best practices to get the most out of your RTLS?  

Tip #1: Consider how every user will interact with the system and what their needs are.  

We often see health systems start with RTLS in one area of a facility, or for a single use case—biomedical teams in need of asset tracking for example. As the health system expands their RTLS initiative, they later learn the original technology used for locating equipment does not fit the needs of nurses who require room-certain accuracy for use cases such as nurse call automation or patient flow. At the beginning of an RTLS project, every potential user (even if it’s down the line) and their needed level of locating precision should be weighed carefully in order to be the most effective with RTLS. Otherwise, the health system will see a hefty price tag as they may have to redesign the RTLS for their growing needs.