From the July 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


CenTrak is also a firm believer in using RTLS to improve efficiency because of the data it can generate.

“Unless you have an army of people with clipboards looking at things 24 hours a day, RTLS is the only thing that can provide visibility and that’s a fundamental component to get [HAIs] numbers down,” says Naim.


By tracking employees and engaging with data, facilities can also link up which employees might have come in contact with an infected patient, giving them better tools to manage infection control.

Miller also adds that this technology has direct and indirect cost savings for health care facilities.

“To do it manually requires nurses to be secret shoppers. That’s an added expense and it still tends to be subjective. Plus, nurses need to be doing direct patient care.” Nurse to patient ratios, or the number of patients a nurse cares for, are already a problem for hospitals, and taking away critical staff from their jobs to an even greater degree could interfere with good patient outcomes.

“Any time we can automate a process that is taking nurses away from patient care, I want to be part of that solution,” says Miller.

Easy integration
RTLS, already in place in many health care facilities, tracks equipment, as well as hospital personnel, through a network that detects tags attached to equipment or badges worn by employees. Hand washing monitoring is easily integrated into such a system and most RTLS companies market hand washing compliance as one component of a bigger package.

“It’s really just another case use for our system. So while we provide tags for staff workflow, this is another add-on feature in the overall system that allows us to monitor staff interactions with patients,” says Tuomo Rutanen, senior vice president for worldwide marketing and business development at Ekahau, an RTLS company headquartered in Virginia.

Although hand washing can be singled out of the package for a company, Rutanen says that his company’s strategy is to market the system for these other things because it’s financially difficult to justify a dedicated solution for hand hygiene alone.

An RTLS is expensive for a hospital no matter how it’s broken down. So to be able to leverage many disciplines over them—like hand hygiene—makes the system much more attractive.

“One investment can be used for many different things,” says Naim. CenTrak aims to brand itself as vendor-neutral, and in doing so, broaden its portfolio to give customers flexibility. CenTrak provides the infrastructure, and various CenTrak certified applications running in the hospital can connect to its server.

July 2012 Magazine

Read more stories from the July 2012 issue

More Magazine Features

More Industry Headlines