On May 6, 2025, the Pennsylvania House passed the Health Care Workplace Violence Prevention Act, which would mandate hospitals to conduct yearly risk assessments with a prevention program aimed at reducing and preventing violence. As part of a holistic approach to staff and nurse safety, this legislation will require compliance with new regulations.
Kontakt.io’s Staff Safety Solution empowers hospitals to meet new workplace violence laws with wearable badges – mobile panic buttons – that send alerts with real-time location tracking and actionable compliance data. Here’s how:
Real-Time Incident Detection and Rapid Response
As detailed in the new Healthcare WPV Prevention Act, healthcare facilities must have a security team that can rapidly and effectively respond to incidents of workplace violence.
How Kontakt.io Helps:
- Hospital staff wear Bluetooth-powered Smart Badges with mobile panic buttons
- These buttons send instant alerts to security teams or designated responders
- This alert shares the continuous real-time location of the staff member with room-level accuracy, enabling rapid response and de-escalation
Risk Assessment and Environmental Visibility
Each year, hospital committees must conduct a risk assessment of their facilities including an evaluation of the safety of the physical layout, public access points, parking lots and more. Layout and design is critical, as detailed in this blog post from Kontakt.io Chief Security Advisor on the latest IAHSS Guidelines.
Additionally, at least 50% of the members of this committee must be non-managerial staff providing direct patient care or clinical services or employees who interface with the public. This committee will be required to perform an initial risk assessment based on analysis of incidents from the past five years.
How Kontakt.io Helps:
- With RTLS data, we provide facility-wide analytics including incident patterns by staff role, time/day of the week, floors/departments, which helps identify at-risk areas
- Kontakt.io’s Staff Safety mobile panic button works both indoors and outdoors, including parking lots and garages
- Kontakt can also detect and alert security of unauthorized personnel in restricted areas
Workplace Violence Reporting and Documentation
As we know, as many as 80% of all incidents go unreported, a topic discussed in this Executive Talk: Elevating the Caregiver Experience with Kontakt.io CEO and Mary Beth Kingston, former CNO at Advocate Health. To that point, this Act now requires healthcare facilities to provide a method to expedite reporting, track incidents, and maintain records for a minimum of three years.
How Kontakt.io Helps:
- Every alert and response is timestamped, geolocated, and stored securely on the cloud, supporting documentation requirements
- Additionally, hospital staff can add to event reports directly on their mobile device, creating a sophisticated incident report with details of the nature of the events along with resolution methods used to de-escalate them
- Real-time dashboards provide trend analysis and easy report generation for both internal reviews and compliance filings
Transparent Oversight and Committee Support
At Kontakt.io, we believe in transparency and shining a light in the overlooked areas of staff safety. Now, with this Act, hospitals must submit reports to their violence prevention committee, make risk assessments public, and update prevention plans annually.
How Kontakt.io Helps:
- Our open API solutions seamlessly integrates with existing systems like nurse call, overhead paging, and cameras — so hospitals can enhance staff safety without replacing or reconfiguring their current investments
- Kontakt.io dashboards enable one-click exports of detailed reports that can be shared with regulators, employees, or made publicly available as required
- Customers like Holyoke Medical Center and Northeast Georgia Health System are publicly heralded for their investment and commitment to staff safety, including this Business Insider article on NGHS
Conclusion
Kontakt.io’s Staff Safety Solution not only helps protect nurses and prevent nurse duress, it also directly aligns with new regulations and compliance, empowering hospitals and healthcare facilities to fulfill the obligations of the Health Care Workplace Violence Prevention Act and other legislation.
Kontakt.io Staff Safety Solution and Smart Badges with mobile panic buttons:
- Instant alerts with real-time location tracking
- Automated incident documentation and analytics
- Data dashboards for proactive risk assessments
- Built-in support for regulatory reporting
- Easy to use, easy to deploy