The healthcare industry faces critical challenges in ensuring staff safety, reducing nurse burnout, and increasing retention. Crystal Galdamez, Healthcare Innovation Clinical Consultant at Kontakt.io discusses how smart hospital technology offers emerging opportunities to address these issues head on.

• Understand the urgency and impact of the problem on patient care, staff well-being, and hospital margins.
• Learn how research has identified the correlation between high levels of job satisfaction with low rates of employment turnover, improved patient outcomes, and increased productivity.
• Discover emerging opportunities for technology integration to enhance staff safety, circumvent nurse burnout, and increase retention.

Healthcare staffing shortages are the highest they’ve ever been in modern history. This calls for swift action, and Kontakt.io’s technology solutions are the answer you need to transform your facility into a safe and supportive environment for staff.

Current Trends in Annual Nurse Turnover

Nursing staff turnover rates over the past three years ranged between 20% to 30%. Surveys conducted by NNU, NSI Reports, and HealthCare Finance provide worrisome data:

• 81.6% of surveyed nurses experienced workplace violence in the past year.
• 6 out of 10 nurses are leaving the profession due to violence.
• The average hospital loses between $6.6M and $10.5M annually.

Each percentage change in nurse turnover can cost or save the average hospital an additional $380,600 per year, making it crucial to address how safety concerns and burnout have dramatically increased the number of nurses quitting their jobs.

Research-Backed Discoveries of the Relationship Between Staff Safety, Job Satisfaction, and Positive Outcomes in Healthcare

Prioritizing staff well-being leads to significant benefits for both patients and organizations. It’s a proven fact that when nurses feel safe at work, they experience lower stress levels, have more trust in the organization, and report a higher rate of job satisfaction and lower burnout.

These facts translate to some critical numbers. Nurses with higher job satisfaction were 2.3 times less likely to leave their jobs, 12% more productive, and contributed to more positive patient outcomes. Studies show that healthcare facilities with a strong safety culture had lower rates of patient mortality and complications. The lower stress and anxiety levels of staff lead to better decision-making and increased focus, resulting in improved care quality.

In a safe environment, staff can focus on patient care instead of worrying about their own safety. These facilities also showed improved teamwork in collaboration and communication for better coordination of care and reduced errors.

What Are the Features and Goals of Smart Hospital Technology?

The goal of smart hospitals is to provide high-quality, patient-centered care that is more efficient, cost-effective, and safer than traditional healthcare delivery. A smart hospital accomplishes these goals using advanced technology like digital workflows, big data, artificial intelligence, IoT (the Internet of Things), and connected medical devices to improve the delivery of care and increase operational efficiency.

One of the key features of a smart hospital is access to real-time location tracking of key human and capital resources. Many of the most beneficial use cases in smart hospitals are based on this ability to monitor locations in real time.

Real-time location data provides stakeholders with insights into things like workflows, asset utilization, patient care, and overall operational efficiency. Smart hospitals can adapt clinical processes, patient care policies, and general facility management based on the data available from tracking the physical location of people and assets.

Best Technology to Provide the Basic Network for Smart Hospitals

Several technologies can provide the basic network for smart hospitals, but Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is the best choice for several reasons:

• It’s open source and scalable for multiple use cases since most IoT sensors incorporate a BLE communication protocol.
• BLE is embedded into most infrastructure networking devices like Wi-Fi, access points, cameras, tablet displays, and even lighting, which can participate in location detection as well as data backhaul.
• Battery life in BLE devices is much longer, meaning less maintenance and lower cost of ownership.

Kontakt.io solutions use BLE for these primary reasons, with the promise to customers that their IoT roadmap remains secure for the next 5 to 10 years.

Real-Time Visibility Into Staff Safety: How These Technologies Help

Real-time tracking improves staff safety by instantly identifying the exact location of an employee who sends out an alert when under duress. Nurses can have wearable wireless devices such as smart badge holders that they can activate in different ways in the event of a threatening situation.

The technology supports customizable notifications, which are then pushed to a central command system, or wireless mobile device, and pinpoint the exact location of the duress with room-level accuracy. This capability allows nurses to feel safe and empowered, which are conditions necessary for nurses to provide exceptional care.

The urgent need for action to keep nurses and other healthcare staff safe is gaining recognition. For example, the state of Texas recently passed Senate Bill 40 aimed at reducing workplace violence against healthcare workers. This, and other similar measures demonstrates how this issue is warranting serious attention.

Digitally Transforming Care Delivery

Understanding how patients move through the care delivery process, and how staff and assets move through the facility, helps to uncover waste, optimize workflows, and help staff and patients feel valued.

Cloud and IoT sensors make it possible to collect big data across the care delivery operation in an affordable and scalable way. AI makes it possible to use this data to build responsive health systems that anticipate and adapt to constantly changing operational and human needs. By leveraging technology thoughtfully, we can create a healthcare system that prioritizes both patient well-being and staff safety and satisfaction.

What to Expect From the Implementation Process

Kontakt.io partners with hospitals to digitally transform care delivery and complement their existing prevention plans and training systems with our AI-powered technology. Technology is a beacon of hope that addresses some of the most challenging issues faced by the healthcare industry today.

Our staff safety system has an open integration and works with third-party software and hardware, making it easy to enhance your existing system with additional use cases. Kontakt.io’s technologies are scalable, plug-and-play solutions with a high speed to value. We can go live within four weeks for an average 200-bed hospital, without interrupting patient care. Your staff feel safer and more secure without giving up their privacy, as our system doesn’t track the employee, but works to track and pinpoint locations to send help in case of duress.

Protecting our healthcare workers is a top priority and we must do better. At Kontakt.io, we build technology that allows users and hospital administrators to understand how patients move through the care delivery process, digitally transforming care for the better and improving hospital margins for a win-win.

Workplace violence is not part of a nurse’s job. We cannot afford to remain status quo on this. Investing in our nurses and healthcare workforce is not an expense. It is an investment in the future of healthcare with a high ROI.

Find out more about the benefits of smart hospitals and how Kontakt.io can implement digital solutions that improve staff safety, patient care, and hospital margins. Sign up to view our webinars or watch them on demand.