Culture Shift to Hospital Automation is Well Worth the Process

Managing hospital capacity – through automation – is now a strategic initiative for many healthcare institutions because it’s one of the fastest ways to reduce cost, generate income and maintain quality of care.

Embracing such automation is a big cultural and behavioral change.  For example, centralized patient placement gives a hospital visibility into its entire operation. Someone with a bird’s eye view can make decisions on an enterprise scale, and prioritize patient placements based on needs.

In TeleTracking’s automated environment, all physical hospital operations can be monitored in real-time, allowing managers to react in seconds to changes that might otherwise negatively impact patient care and hospital margins. A tighter operational platform drives out waste; it improves operational and financial efficiencies, and gets patients into the right bed at the right time with the right resources.

It makes the entire enterprise transparent from an operational standpoint, so everyone is now accountable for performance. You can view the key metrics—transport times, transport requests, transport wait times—and then ultimately map those back to length of stay and other critical performance goals.

When a hospital or health system is dealing with high occupancy and capacity issues, hospital automation allows us to take a look at how they’re managing patient flow and length of stay. It involves workflow analysis, process change, and a review of technology options.

We have the experience to back up our recommendations. From a single bed management application first launched 23 years ago, we’ve grown into a company that monitors and addresses inefficiency at virtually every point along the care continuum through hospital automation.

From our BedTracking® application, which automated the turnover and room cleaning process, to TransportTracking™, which automated the transport department, to PreAdmitTracking® with the electronic bedboard®, which has replaced the white board in most large hospitals, we’ve been focused on creating a digital environment that provides a better way to manage patient placement and hospital census.

And the best is yet to come!