The central priority for hospital staff is patient care. Anytime staff focus is diverted, whether it’s because of missing equipment, safety concerns, or anything else, patient care can suffer.
Real-time location systems (RTLS) can help hospitals keep staff focused on their mission, while also keeping them safe and improving efficiency. Older technologies — such as infrared and ultrasound — are costly and require expensive infrastructure. Solutions that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) as the location engine, however, can help hospitals achieve better location accuracy at a more affordable price point.
Learn how AI has removed the hurdles that healthcare organizations experienced with older RTLS technologies.
Less Expensive Infrastructure
Infrared- and ultrasound-based RTLS technologies require heavy and expensive infrastructure, which significantly drives up implementation costs, maintenance costs, and creates additional burden on staff. Installation requires equipment in every room and wires throughout the ceilings — a costly and disruptive endeavor. During installation, patient and operating rooms can be unavailable for several days, impacting care, efficiency and revenue.
Platforms that use AI as the location engine, can achieve room-level accuracy with an ultralight infrastructure and minimum disruption to the facility. Physical installations are measured in days, not weeks or months.
Fast Path to ROI
And that speed and cost efficiency means faster ROI. An AI-based RTLS system can provide accurate and cost-effective location services — while illuminating opportunities for larger-scale cost savings for hospitals. The system can provide utilization data enabling hospitals to improve workflows, right-size inventory, reduce equipment rentals, and make better purchasing decisions.
Improve Accuracy with AI as Your Location Engine
When equipment is consistently easy to find, healthcare workers can focus their attention on what’s really important: patient health and satisfaction. And, when hospitals make changes to their layouts — due to renovations or expansions, for instance — they have to make expensive revisions to the system setup.
AI-based systems leverage machine learning to learn the hospital’s footprint and determine the exact location of equipment. With Cognosos’ AI-powered RTLS, gateways can receive information from tags within a 100,000-square-foot range—covering a hospital’s entire campus. And accuracy isn’t compromised if the hospital changes its physical layout. The system easily adapts to new spaces without any new wiring or hardware.
This accuracy not only allows staff to easily find equipment when it’s needed, it can help keep them safe. Because it uses AI as the location engine, a staff duress system like Cognosos Guardian knows the precise location of a duress event, whether it’s in a hallway or parking garage, so help can arrive at the right spot quickly.
For a deeper look at how using AI as a location engine has changed real-time location systems, download our guide, “How AI Changed the RTLS Game.”
The guide explores how AI-based solutions:
- Overcome traditional shortcomings of RTLS
- Optimize asset management
- Address healthcare workplace violence incidents
- And more!
