Error-Free Data Available! Real Performance Improvements in 90 Days!
Hospitals are run by smart people – very smart people. We instinctively know where there problems are and essentially know how to go about fixing them. But convincing our peers and our managers (or the accountants) is a wholly different experience. Modern administrators’ desire data, admire analysis, and crave consensus. But our attempts are routinely foiled by proprietary clinical systems, disparate data standards, acute data quality problems, and poor data management processes. Data does exist, but either we can’t get at it or people don’t believe in it. We agonize over the lack of data to help us improve fairly basic processes: reducing patient waiting times, reducing on-hand inventory, improving compliance, improving patient satisfaction, and providing assurances that people are doing their job. For these and many other process issues, there is a way to solve the data access and data quality problem. Create your own easily accessible, error-free Data! Please read on.
Creating a New Layer of Error-Free data is available through the deployment of a number of technologies that might have been previously overlooked, misunderstood, or whose function or cost has improved greatly over the last 3-5 years. One of the most powerful of these technologies is the Real Time Locator Service or RTLS. This is an approach whereby a patient, a nurse, a bed, a pump, or anything that moves or has a power switch can have an “intelligent” tag attached that automatically transmits its exact location to a hidden network of readers (typically in the ceiling) so that we have a running record of the movement of that person or item. So what? Think of this! For very little money, a hospital can implement this kind of technology and achieve the following analysis, and the correspondingly available performance improvements, in about 90 days.
- ER Patients not waiting for more than 15 minutes without an interaction with a greeter, a nurse, or a physician
- ER patients waiting more than a certain threshold, based on triage level, get flagged receive special handling, and get proof that the special handling occurred
- Immediately return to central stores, or to a vendor, expensive inventory items that haven’t moved or been used in 30 days
- Prove to your inventory manager that you are running out of a certain item 3 times a week by showing an actual, to-the-minute usage pattern report
- Prevent infusion pumps from walking out the back door and onto e-Bay
- Prevent unauthorized access to the nuclear material cabinet by requiring an authorized user, and the authorized key, to present simultaneously to the authorized cabinet for access
- Definitively calculate the amount of time nurses and docs are on the floor, behind a nursing station, making rounds, in the breakroom, etc to alter work assignments and improve productivity
- Definitively identify throughput bottlenecks in real-time, and immediately take action to restore patient flows
All of this from an effective RTLS system coupled with analytics and data visualization tools. Get error-free data. Without spending a lot of money. Without integrating with a closed, proprietary system. But getting tangible improvements in 90 days start-to-finish.
What's not to like about that?
