Sanford Health Moorhead Clinic
Sanford Health’s Moorhead Clinic Leverages Sonitor Sense™ RTLS to Optimize and Accelerate Patient Flow and Throughput.
Today’s healthcare environment is continuously looking for solutions that deliver efficiencies and help contain medical costs while still delivering consistent high-quality care. Sanford Health, a non-profit health care facility with multiple locations faced these challenges head-on in the design and implementation of their patient-centric clinic in Moorhead, Minnesota. Sanford’s aim was to launch a new out-patient medical center that would accelerate access to care for patients by creating a more efficient clinic with more collaborative clinical teams. They wanted to ensure patients would not waste time in a waiting or examination room for long periods without a caregiver but would instead flow through the facility quickly and efficiently. To help them achieve this, they designed and built a facility that integrated Sonitor’s unique ultrasound-based, Sense RTLS solution.
“Our use of tags is to help us predict workflow. It’s to help add control in an area of variation. It’s to let people know when the next patient is in the room. It’s not guesswork. How are we going to move patients through our building in a nice efficient planned manner without interruptions and delays.”
— Jim Engelstad, Project Manager, Sanford Health
To optimize and accelerate patient flow and throughput, Sanford’s Moorhead Clinic was designed so events associated with patients and staff can be easily monitored. With the accuracy and reliability of Sonitor Sense RTLS, the clinic can easily monitor, and track patient events based on staff and patient location data. This ultimately lets Moorhead find ways to better predict workflow, improve patient satisfaction, and catch any delays in real-time, based on RTLS data.
At the Moorhead Clinic, when a patient arrives, they are assigned a Sonitor SmartTag™ that they keep with them throughout their visit. Upon check-in they are instructed to report to an assigned room and follow colored and signed placards throughout the facility so that they can self-room. This allows them to skip the waiting room entirely and eliminates the need for a staff member to collect them and walk them to the exam room. When they arrive in the designated exam room, their SmartTag receives ultrasound positioning data from the Sonitor Sense Quad-LT™ (Location Transmitter) located in the room which is then displayed through Infor software to the caregivers through a dashboard at the nursing stations.
“When you’re talking about less time for total visit time, you’re talking about increased capacity or at least the opportunity to increase your capacity without having to build additional square footage.”
— Jim Engelstad, Project Manager, Sanford Health
By delivering accurate indoor positioning data, time spent searching for patients can be reduced significantly, allowing more time for patient care and other patient-focused activities. The Sonitor SmartTags provide location data every 1-3 seconds so a caregiver can know exactly when a patient has arrived and is in the examination room. That information is displayed on a dashboard and shared via text or email to the appropriate caregiver, so that they know exactly when to enter the exam room and can optimize their time and schedule. This can help patients move through the clinic more efficiently and ensure that staff is utilized to their fullest. At the end of a patient’s visit, the last staff member to attend to that individual retrieves the patient’s tag.
Sonitor’s SmartTags which are water-resistant and can be sterilized, are then cleaned. When the patient is discharged, the tag can be reissued to another patient. By optimizing patient flow and throughput, the Moorhead Clinic has been able to maximize facility space to ensure they are using it in the most efficient way. As a result of self-rooming, patients are no longer sitting in a waiting room, and during the initial design, the clinic was able to reduce waiting room chairs from 6.2 to 2.8 per every doctor. Smaller waiting rooms can mean reducing square footage needs to deliver one time savings that can be reinvested to help further grow the facility. Optimizing efficiency, workflow and capacity turns into real savings. A savings of one minute of a nurse’s time per patient per day could easily translate into a 1,000 hours of staff time per year and open enough minutes of a caregiver’s time to add several hundred more patient visits per year. Seeing just two to five patients more per day could deliver hundreds of thousands of dollars in more revenue per year.
Deployment of Sonitor Sense RTLS has helped to deliver significant value to Sanford’s Moorhead Clinic by:
Providing patients with accelerated access to care.
Optimizing and accelerating patient flow and throughput .
Optimizing and maximizing resource capacity and collaboration.
Optimizing and maximizing spatial capacity and Improving overall financial outcomes