The Low “Go-Live Risk” of RTLS

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Marcus Ruark

In the most recent “Top 20 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Services,” KLAS identified different market segments “as having products that demonstrated the lowest risk of failure versus those most likely to deliver a lemon.” According to KLAS, here are the segments with the “lowest go-live risk”:

1) Interface Engines
2) Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS)
3) Health Information Exchange (HIE) (Private)
4) Revenue Cycle – Other
5) Patient Flow

And here are the segments “most likely to deliver a lemon”:

1) Anesthesia
2) Medication Administration
3) Ambulatory EMR
4) Practice Management
5) Patient Accounting and Patient Management

Per KLAS, note that this “includes data from providers on products that went live this past year [November 15, 2010 to November 15, 2011] across all size breakouts. A minimum of three vendors with new product go lives were required for a market segment to be eligible.”
Source: “2011 Top 20 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Professional Services,” December, 2011. © 2011 KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved. www.KLASresearch.com

This is particularly noteworthy for Intelligent InSites and our customers: 3 of the top 5 low risk market segments are addressed by our core RTLS software solution: Interface Engine (via the InSites Platform), Real-Time Location System (RTLS, where our solution is currently rated by KLAS), and Patient Flow!

So, while we often talk of the hard-dollar ROI of RTLS, I think it’s worth noting that RTLS solutions are also leading the market in terms of providing a low risk solution!

Sincerely,
Marcus Ruark
Intelligent InSites

Share
Posted in Healthcare Trends, News | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Happy Nurses. Happy Patients.

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Tom Schneider

I believe in a simple concept: Happy Team Members lead to Happy Customers. When you care about your team members, when you invest in your team members, and when you focus on team members satisfaction, every customer interaction becomes more meaningful, more caring, and more satisfying.

What better time than National Nurses Week to promote such a concept in our healthcare environment. While it is great to see so many hospitals having a “patient-centric” focus, they often don’t know the best path to achieve this. Notably, hospitals with the highest levels of patient care and HCAHPS scores are usually ones that focus on the happiness of their staff.

Why do nurses become nurses? Is it the level of income or arduous work hours? I believe it is their selflessness and their passion to care for others. So why not give them the best environment to do this?

One of the ways to help create this caring environment and invest in your nursing staff is through a real-time locating system (RTLS). Locating and knowing the real-time status of hospital equipment is a key feature of our RTLS software—and this real-time awareness and information has a direct impact on the nursing staff. Searching everywhere for an available IV pump takes away from the time a nurse can be caring for a patient. Instead, provide your people with the ability to find equipment immediately! You can also monitor patient progress from admission to discharge, proactively react to potential bottlenecks, and reduce manual data entry—in each case, allowing nurses to spend more time at the patient bedside.

To celebrate National Nurses Week, let’s not only thank them for their care but let’s continue to invest in their satisfaction and their happiness.

Best,
Tom Schneider, Chief Operating Officer
Intelligent InSites

Share
Posted in Healthcare Trends | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Leveraging RTLS Data from Cisco Wi-Fi Networks

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Marcus Ruark

Wi-FiHappy Cisco de Mayo! As you might have seen earlier this week, our enterprise RTLS software platform now supports real-time location and condition-sensing data from Cisco Wi-Fi networks via our RTLS integration with the Cisco Mobility Services Engine (also known as the Cisco MSE).

Now, any hospital with a Cisco Wi-Fi network, a Cisco MSE, and CCX compatible Wi-Fi RTLS tags from Aeroscout, CenTrak, and Ekahau, among many others, can get quick access to the enterprise RTLS capabilities and benefits of the Intelligent InSites solution. This includes our industry-leading asset management application, patient flow and capacity management solutions, temperature monitoring application, and enterprise RTLS business intelligence solution.

Or, if you are a hospital or healthcare system considering RTLS, you can leverage the flexibility and open architecture of the Intelligent InSites solution to work with whichever RTLS hardware makes sense for your facility, your use cases, and your budget, and synthesize information from multiple sources of real-time data. For instance, you might use Wi-Fi to track your Wi-Fi client devices, while using a different RTLS technology to track your infusion pumps. All of this real-time data is collected and processed by our platform to provide a seamless, unified RTLS solution to hospital users.

If you are interesting in learning more about our Wi-Fi RTLS integration, or the advantages of supporting multiple sources of real-time information, please let us know!

Sincerely,
Marcus Ruark, Vice President
Intelligent InSites

Share
Posted in News | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Surgeons Get RTLS

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Dr. Ray Gruby

RTLS in healthcareRecently I had the privilege to attend the South Dakota and North Dakota Chapters of the American College of Surgeons 2012 Annual Meeting, where I presented to my fellow colleagues a session on how Real-Time Location System (RTLS) solutions can improve medical staff efficiency, patient safety and satisfaction, and operational performance.

Here are two main observations I made during the conference:

1. There is an increased focus on process improvement.
Only one paper presented at the Friday conference was purely about a new surgical technique. Otherwise every presentation dealt with processes or systems. I was positively surprised to see that the audience of my session was very knowledgeable about Lean and Six Sigma, and understood the need for continuous process improvement. I felt my colleagues truly got it, as there was collective recognition of how valuable an RTLS solution could be in gaining a real-time view of what’s happening in their facilities. From tracking and managing the location and history of their surgical instruments, to knowing the location of patients in real time, to keeping patients’ families informed about the current status of their loved one—the majority agreed that RTLS can provide the means to achieve maximum performance and top levels of patient and staff satisfaction.

2. The existence of information silos impairs the effectiveness of care delivery.
Among the attending surgeons that I personally spoke with, there was a consensus that one of the primary obstacles to major gains in medicine remains the same: our industry continues to deploy disparate and dysfunctional systems and processes. Fortunately, there is a promising cure to this “disease”: using an open platform to get automatically-collect data seamlessly flowing between a multitude of healthcare IT systems. Only then can we truly transform the way we provide care.

The meeting was very insightful for me, and I have to say that I was proud that the healthcare solutions we provide are so strongly connected with the mission of the American College of Surgeons—improving the care of the surgical patient and safeguarding standards of care in an optimal and ethical practice environment.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ray Gruby
Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer at Intelligent InSites

Share
Posted in Healthcare Trends, News, Process Improvement | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Mobility Solutions Make Medical Staff More Efficient

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Marcus Ruark

InSites Connect appAccording to a new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, mobile devices (in this particular research–iPads) not only make medical personnel feel more efficient at their jobs, they actually improved their work flow.

Four months after giving out iPads, 90 percent of the medical residents said they were using the tablets for work, and most of them said they used it every day. More than three quarters of residents said the iPads had helped them save about an hour a day, and 68 percent said delays in patient care were prevented because of the tablet.

With the same goal in mind – reducing the time healthcare providers spend in non-value added time, we have launched our RTLS mobility application, which enables on-the-go access to key information, including the real-time location and status of medical equipment, patients, and staff.

Our InSites Connect™ app (available now in Apple’s App Store) not only puts real-time information in the hands of care providers, but staff can easily send and receive time-sensitive alerts, messages, and tasks. They can then acknowledge that they are handling the alert or task, route it to another person, or update their task status with a simple finger tap.

When we asked Mary Jagim, RN, BSN, CEN, FAEN, and Chief Nursing Officer at Intelligent InSites, what is the biggest value of our InSites Connect app, she simply said: “More time with patients!”

Marcus Ruark, Vice President
Intelligent InSites

Share
Posted in Healthcare Trends, News, Process Improvement | Tagged , , | Leave a comment