WHITEPAPER
Indoor positioning for safer,
more connected,
and welcoming hospitals
A hospital is possibly the most complicated space to plan, both on a structural and organizational level. Indoor positioning systems play an important role in the transformation of medical centres into intelligent buildings. In this whitepaper, we take an in-depth look at this process.
Up until today, hospitals have been designed in the same way as factories: health care centres in which users were constantly passing through professional hands to find solutions to their problems. Therefore, as cities grew, so did hospitals and their complexity, often adding floors and floors. Thus, the patient was relegated to a passive role as a piece to be fixed in a long production line. This has changed or is in the process of changing, and hospitals are rethinking not only their construction but also the use of space and the patient experience.
The challenge: safe, friendly, and efficient hospitals for thousands of patients, employees, and visitors
In a hospital space we can find medical consultations by specialties, waiting rooms, nursing rooms, laboratories, therapy areas, meeting rooms, radiological test areas, analysis rooms, ICU and other patient monitoring areas, dining rooms, logistics and documentation areas, administrative areas… These are huge buildings, often vertically planned, that require people to move between floors, especially the older facilities, but also the modern ones. The Turkish hospital services network Medrics, for example, manages the urban hospital in Mersin, which, with more than 1,200 beds, is one of the largest in Europe.
But it is not only the spatial deployment that is complicated. Managers must also coordinate the many different professionals who move incessantly through the corridors and wards to do their work: doctors, nurses, assistants, orderlies, therapists, cleaners, administrative staff, technicians, suppliers, managers, security staff… To understand what this means and to translate it into reality, let us remember that 6,000 professionals work daily at the Hospital 12 de Octubre in Madrid alone.
Finally, the most important, central factor: the patient. Hundreds, thousands of people (between users and caregivers) move through the maze-like hospital to get to the emergency room, run or pick up tests, go to medical appointments or visit patients. As almost all of us have experienced it, orientation is not easy at all: satisfaction surveys in hospitals where Situm has deployed its indoor navigation solutions show that orientation is among the top four inconveniences for patients during their visit.
How can we improve and optimize this entire organization?
Basically, by digitizing and automating processes as much as possible. Keeping staff and processes under control is essential for the smoothest possible workflow within the confines of the hospital. Both in terms of resource and patient management, the most obvious solution is to rely on technology that allows tracking within this immense interior space. Indeed, knowing where every human resource (staff), device, test, or record is, would be a huge organizational advantage. Therefore, Situm proposes solutions for locating people and mobile assets, which, without the need for large deployments or investments, facilitates real-time management of critical issues.
If you want to learn more about the healthcare sector and the role that indoor positioning technology plays in it, you can now request a free download of this whitepaper using the form on this page.
What will you learn?
The specific characteristics of the healthcare sector, its current state, prospects, and main challenges in terms of staff and patient management.
New trends implemented through technology such as visitor guidance or worker and patient management.
How Situm’s indoor positioning technology is already helping improve patient care and the organization of hospital activities.