What Level of RTLS Precision Does Healthcare Require?
Healthcare RTLS solutions require clinical-grade, certainty-based locating with 100% accuracy in defined zones—beyond mere meter-range estimates—to precisely track staff, patients, and equipment within specific areas like patient rooms or nursing stations, enabling true workflow automation and process improvements that vary depending on the technology's granularity, reliability, and update speed.
RTLS and RFID technologies are becoming more prevalent in today's hospitals. Healthcare facilities are finding that the location awareness of staff, patients, and equipment is a pivotal component of clinical efficiency and enhancing the patient experience.
Many healthcare executives and clinical staff members inquire about the level of accuracy needed from their RTLS solution provider. The question is often phrased as, "Will the accuracy be within (x number of) meters of its identified location?" However, in a clinical setting, an estimated location "within a few meters" isn't precise enough for many RTLS applications in healthcare. One meter, three meters, or five meters—all of these desired specifications still leave room for error and uncertainty. For example, one meter can mean the difference between an IV pump in a patient's room, out in the hallway, or in a soiled closet.
In many cases, the level of granularity required should not be an estimated distance, but rather the fact that—with 100% absolute certainty—an asset, patient, or staff member is in or out of the clinically meaningful zone you have defined. This is what is called certainty-based or clinical-grade locating. With a certainty-based RTLS platform, you can segment spaces such as patient rooms, beds, bays, nursing stations, hallway sections, and other relevant areas to drive true workflow automation.
Granularity, reliability, and update speeds can vary widely by the RTLS technology type. Additionally, there is a hierarchy of locating needs, proceeding from zone-level locating and presence detection (most often achieved with an RF-only technology, such as Wi-Fi), to locating the current status of patients and staff, and finally to workflow enhancement where true process improvements can be facilitated. The more precise an object's location needs to be pinpointed, the more likely a certainty-based technology (e.g., Gen2IR™) will need to be utilized. Certainty-based locating identifies an object's position within a defined clinical space and with high precision, even as it moves throughout the facility.
It is this idea of required location accuracy that determines the correct RTLS solution for your medical center. Ideally, the RTLS solution chosen should not only meet the requirements for the current problem, but be flexible enough to grow from location tracking to contextual awareness. It should have the capability to segment spaces into clinically meaningful zones and integrate with other enterprise information systems—EMR, RIS, and the like. Finally, it should have the capability not only to share data, but to aggregate, distill, analyze, and produce actionable information.
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