Riverside Healthcare is a fully integrated healthcare system serving the needs of patients throughout the counties of Kankakee, Iroquois, Will, Grundy, and beyond. As part of the system, Riverside Medical Center, a 300-bed hospital, provides a full scope of inpatient and outpatient care and is a nationally recognized, award-winning Level II Trauma hospital with nationally leading programs in heart care, cancer care, neurosurgery, and orthopedics.
Riverside is a nationally recognized trauma hospital that is consistently one of the best performing medical centers of its nature. It has the distinction of being one of the best trauma centers in the nation when it comes to cancer care, heart care, neurosurgery, and orthopedics.
Problem
Riverside wanted to address two primary issues, both related to their ability to track locations.
In the first instance, they wanted a more reliable way to quickly locate devices. Like every hospital, Riverside Medical Center is full of small, expensive devices that are essential for various aspects of patient care. Their size and the fact they are used across a wide area usually result in them being dispersed and their locations going undocumented or, at a minimum, not updated. When these devices are needed, time is often wasted searching for them, creating inefficiencies resulting in a poor patient experience and frustration for staff. When the devices are needed during an emergency, these problems are intensified for obvious reasons, creating an additional stress factor and further use the IoT technology, especially in their upcoming outpatient clinic.
The other tracking capability Riverside wanted to gain involved the patients themselves. Patient elopement — when patients leave hospital property without having been formally released — is an issue for any healthcare facility. This includes both patients whose treatment has been completed and others who suffer from mental health issues that require more attention. Riverside’s commitment to patient safety made the ability to track patient location attractive, something that was more easily achievable through an RTLS. On top of that, the same system could be used to monitor patient location to ensure they did not wander into restricted or dangerous areas of the building. Being able to instantly locate any patient and get alerts when someone left the hospital property or entered a particular zone was something that could dramatically enhance safety protocols throughout the facility.
Kontakt.io Medical Device Tracking & Patient Elopement Solution
RTLS & IoT capabilities powered by Kontakt.io have delivered exactly what Riverside needed to address these issues. Kontakt.io supplied a complete solution, from IoT devices and asset tags to gateways, patient wristbands and a software solution that allows their clinical and BioMed engineers to easily understand the PAR level of devices, locate where the devices are on the map, quickly find them on the floor, and, most importantly, quickly and easily identify the location of each patient in the hospital. The alerts in the platform allow nurses to be immediately notified when a patient leaves a designated area.
Kontakt.io provided a plug-and-play solution with preprogrammed hardware. Riverside deployed it during COVID, which required them to execute the entire deployment on their own. Kontakt.io’s philosophy of delivering simple, affordable, and accessible solutions fit their needs perfectly.
Erik Devine, CISO at Riverside describes the instant improvement that RLTS brought to the hospital — “When we looked at the data collected by the medical pumps, we discovered that the combined amount of time the staff spent looking for the pumps added up to a full-time staff position. That means over forty hours a week was dedicated just to finding medical pumps!”
“Working with Kontakt.io was incredibly simple. The set up took just days, they pre-programmed the tags to work with our system and once the devices shipped, we just plugged them in and that was it. It’s a very simple process.”
Riverside is not stopping here, understanding the full potential of IoT solutions that positively impacts patient care and experience as well as staff productivity only motivated them to further use the IoT technology, especially in their upcoming outpatient clinic.
If you’d like to find out more about this project or looking for a solution to your hospital, feel free to contact our healthcare practice leaders to walk you through our solution offering on a discovery call, contact us here.