Inefficient hospital operations take a toll on patient care and satisfaction, staff productivity, and your bottom line. Traditional methods of managing patient flow and bed utilization result in long room turnover times, bed shortages, wasted money, and low patient satisfaction. The key to solving these costly issues is deploying Kontakt.io’s Inpatient Journey Analytics Platform using IoT and RTLS to improve your hospital’s operations.
Challenges in Achieving Optimal Patient Flow and Bed Utilization
Moving patients through your facility to the areas where they can access the care they need promptly is essential to positive health outcomes and patient satisfaction. The main challenges that hospitals face when it comes to efficient patient flow and optimal bed management are:
- Patient length of stay
- Long room turnover times
- Low patient satisfaction
- Money and resource waste
Long wait times, wasted resources, and staff miscommunication all contribute to high frustration levels for both the caregivers and patients. Inefficient hospital practices also drain your finances through wasted time and resources.
Underlying Causes of Poor Bed Capacity Management
There are several reasons behind these challenges of bed utilization. Inefficient patient flow is a major culprit. For example, delayed discharges lead to beds occupied longer than necessary, causing new patients longer wait times to get admitted to a room. Poor communication between hospital departments can also increase the length of patient stays. Lack of a cohesive platform to schedule testing, procedures, and consultations with several caregivers often results in delays in care as one department has to wait on another for results, or the necessary appointment times are unavailable. Software solutions and apps that provide real-time data accessible by all hospital staff can dramatically streamline patient care for shorter hospital stays.
Bed and patient tracking is crucial for easy patient flow and bed management. Without it, your staff can’t track or predict needs with any accuracy. Occupancy and patient tracking provide valuable statistics to help you calculate the need for various inpatient units by specialization and time of year. All data compiled from ongoing monitoring gives you insights into where wasteful practices are causing problems, and where you may need to allocate more resources to fill a higher demand.
The obvious solution to these critical problems involves better bed capacity management, patient flow monitoring, and discharge procedure streamlining. All of which is easily achievable with Kontakt’s IoT and RTLS solutions.
The Role of IoT and RTLS
At Kontakt.io, our Cloud-powered RTLS and IoT leverage your existing Wi-Fi, significantly accelerating time to value while remaining scalable to provide you with incredible flexibility. Our platform uses a combination of IoT devices, tags, sensors, Bluetooth LE gateways, and a Cloud-based computing and analytics platform to create the industry’s most scalable solutions that grow along your operational transformation with a maximum ROI.
Beacons and Nano Tags
Kontakt.io provides a range of smart hardware and location sensors, such as nano tags for monitoring patient flow and asset tags for bed capacity management. Nano tags are attached to a person or object and used to track location by broadcasting an ID number. Our asset tags deliver room-level accuracy to allow you to locate an asset and its movement. We can help you discover which devices are best suited to your needs.
Bluetooth Network
Bluetooth LE gateways are plug-and-play solutions that gather data from your beacons and tags and pass it along to your software. More gateways give you better coverage and accuracy. Kontakt.io’s platform can be wirelessly integrated with your existing Access Points, eliminating the need for cabling or rewiring. You may also use our Portal Lights to augment existing IT & WLAN for connectivity where needed.
Cloud-Based Platform
All of the data gathered and transmitted by your hardware gets enriched and analyzed in real time by the cloud. You then receive alerts, information, and reports via your web and mobile apps.
AI
Our platform takes advantage of AI every step of the way to monitor and predict patient and bed locations. All data is tracked and analyzed by AI to show you where waste or bottlenecks are happening. Plus, you get fast answers and insights to all your questions by using our ChatGPT integration.
Inpatient Journey Analytics
Optimize bed capacity with Kontakt.io’s Inpatient Journey Analytics Platform that utilizes patient tags and auto-discharge & asset management solutions. Implementation and integration into your existing infrastructure are simple. All you need is Wi-Fi to get started. Our plug-and-play technology requires just two weeks to go live with a 400-bed hospital. Once you are up and running, use the platform to gain visibility on all open beds in the facility, automate your workflows, and standardize discharge procedures for faster processing.
IoT devices linked to a real-time location system (RTLS) provide real-time tracking data to inform your inpatient journey analytics platform, so you know exactly how to manage patient flow intelligently. This accurate and up-to-date location tracking lets you follow each patient’s journey to better inform your operational processes to improve efficiency, patient satisfaction, and staff productivity.
With our RTLS, you see what is going on in your facility at all times to help you make smarter, faster decisions that minimize waste. Manage all this from a single platform for incredible convenience and a better overall picture of your facility’s care operations.
Benefits of IoT and RTLS
Transform your bed capacity and patient flow management with Kontakt.io’s Inpatient Journey Analytics Platform. Our AI and real-time location tracking work quickly to identify time and resource waste while optimizing bed capacity. Deploying this technology also improves patient care, making them feel seen by having their needs cared for efficiently and effectively.
Our IoT and RTLS solutions can increase your bed capacity by 20% and save 8,000 hours of idle bedtime each year. This translates to significant cost savings of around $12,000 per bed per year.
Using the Kontakt.io solution can streamline essential functions to increase your room turnover time by 45 minutes per patient and reduce the length of the average stay by up to 1.4 days. Your patients will appreciate better quality, more efficient care, which gives you better reviews and patient satisfaction scores.
Kontakt.io delivers this solution as a service. This means that we provide all software and hardware components necessary. Part of our service includes tagging beds with battery-operated Bluetooth trackers to generate the location data you require to manage bed capacity with ease.
Explore Kontakt.io’s Innovative Healthcare Solutions
Learn more about how implementing IoT and RTLS can improve patient flow and bed capacity management in your facility. Sign up to view our on-demand webinars for a deep dive into how Kontakt.io’s Inpatient Journey Analytics platform can revolutionize your hospital procedures. We provide real-world case studies and advice to show you exactly how these solutions can create a responsive health system that anticipates and adapts to constantly changing operational and human needs.
Olivia Wang
Senior Manager, Brand & Communications
