by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | November 21, 2014
From the November 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“That’s where you really see bang for your buck,” Broussard says. “If you have 15 IV pumps at one facility and at most they use five a day, you can bring them to the other facility.”
Pleshek of Terso suggests starting with a pilot and then creating a roadmap to decide what the system can eventually do. Phyllis Carlin, an IT analyst at MD Buyline, says implementation should involve multiple disciplinary areas across the hospital, including nursing staff, IT, and clinical engineers.
In the majority of cases, the biomedical engineering department “owns” the system because it has such an impact on their ability to,find equipment for preventive maintenance, Carlin says. But involving
representatives from all areas that RTLS impacts — including nursing, sterile processing, the OR, ED,and information technology — is vital.
“Everyone has a different perspective that needs to be considered in the early stage planning when an organization decides on their vision, objectives and goals,” Carlin says. “The group has to arrive at consensus regarding which applications to start with. In the case of equipment tracking, you have to come up with a process to manage requests for tagging additional assets and govern which assets get tagged.”
The system will also gather important data that will help facilities managers and C-suite executives make important business decisions, such as how many infusion pumps to purchase, how much they can reduce rentals of a particular equipment, and what areas of the hospital have the greatest utilization of certain equipment.
“Involving the right stakeholders in the decision-making process is critical to the project’s success — short-term and long-term,” Carlin says. “Because the potential for an RTLS is limitless, planning for a new RTLS project is a very complex process. If you don’t get it right on the front end, it will limit your ROI and benefits.” Carlin says facilities typically have to address infrastructure issues first, and whether they will use an existing wireless network or implement a dedicated one. After that decision has been made, then the supporting system hardware needs are dictated by the software applications the hospital decides to start with.
“It’s not a black and white decision and it requires a lot of careful, thoughtful planning,” Carlin says. “It just can have such far-reaching impact on an organization,” Carlin says. “You need to have that broader vision to see what could be down the road.” Carlin notes hospitals should also market the system internally, especially if it involves the sensitive issue of staff tracking. “The sad stories I hear of customers who haven’t been successful — that can be avoidable with the right kind of executive buy-in and involvement,” Carlin says. “There can be pushback on staff tracking. It can be done; it just has to be handled delicately.”
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