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3 Ways to Implement Automation in Healthcare

Compliance standards weighing you down? We’ll show you three ways Bluetooth can be used to implement automation in healthcare to improve the quality of your organization and save you money.


A recent study from Johns Hopkins University found that in the US, the third leading cause of death is now attributed to medical errors. It’s no secret that we humans make mistakes. But when we recognize those mistakes and have the power to prevent them from occurring in the future, we have an obligation to do so. Automation is part of this solution.

In this post, we will demonstrate the benefits of automating your healthcare organization with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology to:

  • Seamlessly manage compliance standards
  • Future-proof and reduce unnecessary operating costs
  • Improve the quality of care and reduce clerical burden

Automating Compliance and Quality Control

Hospitals need to invest considerable time and resources into maintaining a clean, high-quality facility for the sake of patient and staff well-being. Internal and external regulatory bodies deliver guidelines for best practice compliance standards, but it is your organization’s job to decide how you will meet them.

Temperature and humidity are two mission critical variables for any healthcare organization because the preservation of drugs, vaccines, blood, samples, food, and the spread of bacteria depend on these environmental factors remaining within a certain range. Traditional data loggers provide periodic readings or temperature and humidity levels, but require a person to check the readings, log the data, and run analysis on it over time to know the number and frequency of excursions from the standard that occur on a daily or weekly basis.

However, this is less than ideal for the worker, the patient, and the organization as a whole. Prone to error, fatigue and a general waste of time, modern solutions exist that are far more efficient at performing manual, time-consuming tasks than humans are for a fraction of the cost.

An example of such a solution is our BLE Condition Monitoring which uses beacons and tags to automate environmental monitoring, store data over time, and send proactive email or SMS alerts to stakeholders before a compliance breach ever occurs. This allows staff to use their most precious resource-time-to focus on what matters most: providing quality, timely care to patients.

Value for the Future: Reducing Operating Costs of Automated Systems in Healthcare

We know that introducing new automated systems in healthcare can be difficult. Technology moves fast, budgets are tight, organizations are reluctant to change, and with new solutions popping up daily it can be difficult to know what is actually worth investing in. That is why a prerequisite for a modern technology solution is that it will hang around for a while – that it is in a sense future-proof. Or as future-proof as it can be. An important question you should ask yourself is: will this technology still be relevant in 3, 5 or 10 years time?

Though there are a lot of things we can’t be certain of, one thing that is sure is that our world will continue to be driven by data

“Data has the power to automate many of the jobs humans don’t particularly enjoy and aren’t very good at doing anyway.”

Technology powered by Bluetooth is among the few technologies that industries as diverse as manufacturing, supply chain, and public infrastructure are investing billions in. That is because Bluetooth powered solutions are saving companies a lot of time and money by automating processes, locating assets and people, and other value-adding activities that were previously too expensive or impractical to achieve with other technologies.


Read our white paper on the Active Monitoring in Healthcare


Follow the investment: this is a strong indicator for future success. 

Improving Quality of Care: Reducing Clerical Burnout

The quality of the care provided at a healthcare organization is what comes to define it. Interactions one has with the staff and caregivers–the cleanliness and efficiency–are all contributing factors to the experience for patients and workforce alike.
Bluetooth can help optimize many of the quality issues facing healthcare organizations today including the steady increase in clerical burden.

A recent study found a strong correlation between increased clerical burden (layers of additional tasks outside of the caretakers primary responsibilities) and dissatisfaction among workers. This dissatisfaction can lead to a range of harmful effects for the caretaker, the patient, and the organization as a whole.

By automating many of the tasks that detract caregivers from their primary duties, they can invest themselves further in their work and their patients for the benefit of everyone. Less time spent on tasks that an inexpensive piece of technology can do means more time creating value for patients, the organization, and themselves.

Where to Begin with Automation in the Healthcare Industry?

If all of this seems like a dramatic change from the status quo, don’t worry: it is. BLE is bringing a multi-purpose technology solution that is creating new uses cases and bringing sustainable value to the healthcare industry every day. Contact us to learn more about how we work with companies to solve their business problems.