Source - Ewa Geruzel
Due to Covid-19 pandemic, hospitals and clinics face an influxe of patients seeking urgent help and care, so it’s essential for health institutions to be ready. Hospital wayfinding solutions from Navigine based on indoor navigation technologies and the special IoT equipment from the hardware partner Minew are ready to help. By combining our solutions, we have developed a system dedicated to boosting hospital performance. The system is already live in a number of the US institutions.
Problem Definition
Today, all the time patients face difficulties in searching procedure units and hospital rooms due to the hospital's complex topology. A great number of buildings, halls, and passages complicate navigation. The staff can get into a similar situation when they don’t have enough time to track patients properly and timely come to rooms for rendering urgent assistance.
Overcrowded waiting rooms in hospitals and polyclinics are another major concern. These places do not always can fit all the visitors; moreover, they do not allow for keeping social distancing to prevent the infection of Covid-19, which causes much stress for patients.
One more problem is connected with great costs for medical institutions on searching the wanted equipment. Stolen or lost assets complicate medical staff working processes.
Solution
The cooperation between Navigine and Minew (a supplier of beacons and wearable equipment) allows realizing effective ‘smart hospital’ solutions that can be used in the following directions:
- Navigation inside hospitals for doctors and visitors. The hospital wayfinding solution works with Navigine SDK that is easily implemented into the existing mobile applications. It’s just enough to use the mobile app on the smartphone for building the route to the necessary room and getting to the place as quickly as possible. Moreover, doctors and visitors can utilize Minew E5 Location Beacon for easily and quickly hospital wayfinding, with the configured Parameters via BeaconSET+ APP, users are vastly beneficial in route navigation.
- Patient/asset/equipment tracking. The solution ensures the constant monitoring of assets, visitors, and employees. The platform and location beacons such as Minew E8 assets tracking beacon let the staff get anytime access to all the assets, improving the use of medical equipment. To take better care of patients, Minew B10 Panic Button can greatly avoid potential risks in an emergency, and C10 Card Beacon can help with personnel management. Thanks to these monitoring systems in a hospital, the medical workers are always well-informed about the location of equipment, wheelchairs, and other objects. It reduces the time for searching equipment and allows paying more attention to patients.
Results
The system implementation makes it possible to increase hospital efficiency by 10%. The most significant results of using the Navigine platform in partnership with Minew will be the following:
- Possibility to build convenient and short routes to rooms.
- Total control over equipment and other assets inside hospitals, which reduces the time for their searching by 20%.
- Patient and staff safety by reducing the occupancy rate of waiting rooms.
The location-based platform lets hospitals improve the quality of customer service and increase client loyalty to some specific medical institution.
