By Mary Jagim

Hospitals, urgent care facilities, clinics, and other healthcare centers throughout the United States are continuing to navigate staffing challenges. Almost half of the nurses who responded to a recent McKinsey & Company survey stated that they intended to leave their role soon, a decision that stems primarily from two critical issues: a sense of underappreciation and unsustainable workloads. As staff shortages worsen, the burden on remaining employees intensifies, adversely affecting not only employee well-being but also patient care and the financial stability of healthcare facilities.

Professionals within the healthcare industry have a highly demanding job, with their workdays ranging from managing patient care to handling administrative tasks, while also navigating a potential lack of supplies, resources, or staff. These stressful circumstances pose a significant challenge within the healthcare industry, and one prominent reason is the number of manual administrative and non-clinical tasks shouldered by staff daily.
It’s no secret that improving operational efficiency within hospitals helps to improve staff productivity, morale, care quality, and patient outcomes. Digital technologies successfully implemented in a healthcare system can help reduce annual expenditures by more than 10%, as well as lessen stressors on staff. Providing the necessary support for healthcare staff is key to achieving staff satisfaction, high-quality patient care, and overall retention, along with increasing the facility’s bottom line. Technologies such as real-time location systems (RTLS) have been proven to offer cost-effective solutions that ease operational burdens, increase communication, and enhance safety.

Why leaders should implement RTLS for automated workflows
Lessening the manual tasks of healthcare staff is a critical aspect of combating burnout and promoting retention, and healthcare leaders will find that investing in healthcare professionals makes sense for the facility’s bottom line. To jointly provide the best patient care and create a positive work environment, staff need access to unified platforms that automate workflow to alleviate manual documentation, which can often delay care, and offer proactive communications to each other, patients, and family members. Workflow platforms that leverage RTLS data can keep tabs on key patient flow metrics and ensure staff know where all patients are in their care journey.

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