Implement RTLS in 2025 to Improve the Human Experience in Healthcare

By Caryn Hewitt, MBA, BSN, CENP, CPHQ

As the new year unfolds, pressure continues to grow in the healthcare industry as caregivers and care recipients demand improved outcomes, experiences, efficiency, and satisfaction. Now is the time for healthcare organizations to implement cost-effective digital solutions or enhance existing technology. It’s clear that streamlining time-consuming non-clinical manual tasks and improving operational performance at hospitals helps to enhance staff productivity, care quality, patient outcomes, and morale. These are the improvements patients and healthcare professionals seek in 2025.

Manual tasks, in addition to safety concerns and lack of proper resources, significantly contribute to staff burnout and diminish satisfaction for both patients and caregivers. A recent McKinsey & Company study reported the potential for automated technology and improved task delegation to free up 15% of clinicians’ time, allowing them to dedicate more time to direct patient care and driving greater job fulfillment. When considering how to impactfully address these challenges, it’s best to provide, or scale, solutions that reduce the manual processes that often bog down already overwhelmed healthcare teams. By implementing automated systems and real-time technology, healthcare professionals gain the support and time needed to focus on direct patient care, fostering a more human-centered approach to the care journey.

By strategically implementing an advanced Real-Time Location System (RTLS) platform with real-time visibility on staff display boards, healthcare decision-makers can eliminate the manual, non-clinical tasks and enhance capabilities like staff locating for duress, asset management, infant protection, and more. Equipping healthcare professionals with comprehensive visibility empowers teams to securely monitor the entire facility or department, from the patient journey to equipment status, staff updates, and interactions between these elements, ensuring seamless coordination and enabling quick, informed decisions to prioritize care effectively.

RTLS enhances efficiency and connection for all

The reliable and actionable data provided by comprehensive visibility in healthcare is now more vital than ever. RTLS’ IoT-enabled badges and tags automate the data collection enterprise-wide to gain precise, real-time insights and documentation on clinical workflows, equipment utilization, patient/staff interactions, and overall safety. Like any organization, healthcare facilities must analyze comprehensive data to make informed decisions concerning facility performance, patient experience, equipment supply, staffing plans, long-term goals, and scalability. Healthcare teams and leadership can monitor key patient flow metrics such as patient volume, length of stay, room utilization, and patient wait times by leveraging the system’s built-in patient flow reports. This ensures a smoother and more aligned process for both the patient and the healthcare professional.

Alternatively, patient care delays and clinical workflow bottlenecks often arise when team members need to search for staff or equipment, manually enter data, or manage siloed systems. IoT-enabled location sensors alleviate the administrative burden on clinicians by automating the non-clinical aspects of workflow, ensuring uninterrupted, real-time updates. This eliminates the need for providers to inquire about patient whereabouts or wait for manual status updates, allowing for more efficient daily workflow management and more time to connect with patients. Without advanced location technology, 63% of healthcare workers reported spending over an hour per shift searching for colleagues, data, or devices. Automating these tasks with RTLS cloud-based solutions enables clinicians to operate at their full potential, save time with single-sign-on benefits, and better connect with the person receiving care.

Patients and staff seek facilities with the best outcomes

Enabling staff with fundamental asset visibility is a crucial step toward achieving an operationally efficient healthcare environment. Healthcare facilities can easily scale their existing RTLS solution to offer advanced asset tracking with room-level locating. When every second can impact patient outcomes, healthcare teams must have the ability to ensure that mobile medical equipment (MME) and relevant tools are in stock, clean, and readily available. Egress alerts help reduce lost or stolen equipment while robust utilization analytics help to right-size the equipment fleet, increasing equipment utilization, preventing over-purchasing, and reducing rental costs. RTLS can even notify clinical support staff when adequate Periodic Automatic Replacement (PAR)-levels are at risk and trigger automated replenishment orders.

A large health system in Fort Worth, Texas leveraged centralized RTLS to automate non-value-added tasks and enhance connectivity between caregivers, equipment, and patients. This enabled the team to efficiently manage mobile equipment, PAR-levels, patient transport, and more. Using real-time data, an algorithm was developed to prioritize all tasks related to equipment, patient care, patient transport, patient flow, and capacity management. The algorithm helped increase efficiency by allocating 100% of staff resources to transport during peak times, and by assigning administrative tasks for off-peak hours. These changes led to increased patient capacity and decreased length of stay, with the addition of room status visibility. The results were significant: $1 million in first-year savings, 95% patient satisfaction, and 90% employee engagement.

Patients seek digital experience perks alongside human interaction during care

Even as patients and visitors increasingly seek a human-focused approach to healthcare, they also expect a seamless digital experience. The growing role of technology in daily life has raised patients’ expectations for their healthcare journey to be digitally enhanced as well. A recent study by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) found that 84% of patients demand a “more personalized, holistic digital experience,” and 75% of organizations are embracing a digital-first culture. As healthcare decision-makers strive to meet these growing expectations cost-effectively, digital navigation has emerged as a key solution. The familiar, GPS-like directions offered by digital navigation apps are helping patients navigate healthcare facilities with ease, reducing stress in high-pressure environments and aligning with their digital expectations.

In addition to navigation, patients are also seeking solutions that deliver on-demand information to enhance their stay and experience. These integrated systems provide on-demand access to entertainment, educational content, and personalized care information, offering a more engaging experience. By combining real-time location data with infotainment features, healthcare facilities can provide patients with valuable updates about their care team, visit schedules, and more—creating an environment where patients feel informed and in control of their journey. This integration also helps reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed, offering a sense of comfort through familiar technology during what can be a stressful time.

Optimizing the patient journey begins the moment they enter a healthcare facility, and scaling existing RTLS technology makes it easier to deliver a comprehensive digital experience. Beyond digital wayfinding, interactive campus maps, and user-friendly QR code signage, integrating infotainment systems into these solutions provides patients with a fully connected experience. Clear navigation, combined with personalized care information and entertainment options, enhances overall satisfaction and minimizes anxiety, ensuring that patients and their families can navigate their medical visits with confidence and ease.

Strategically increase experiences and satisfaction for staff and patients

By partnering with a strategic solution provider that offers an advanced and interoperable suite of RTLS use cases and various locating capabilities, teams can future-proof the investment and seamlessly scale to new use cases as necessary to benefit patients and staff. A clinical-grade RTLS with built-in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology offers hybrid architecture that can significantly boost efficiency for organizations aiming to balance precise location monitoring and patient care with cost-effectiveness and staff support. A hybrid system that can switch between BLE and other, more precise, location offerings enable healthcare facilities to utilize a cost-effective mixed RTLS infrastructure within a single department or across an entire hospital campus.

As healthcare decision-makers seek to offer higher value propositions throughout their facilities, they must consider real-time location technologies that improve outcomes for the patient and family, while also making the clinician’s job more efficient and fulfilling.

Caryn Hewitt is the Senior Director, Consulting Services at CenTrak, which offers locating, sensing, and security solutions for the healthcare industry. CenTrak has helped more than 2,000 healthcare organizations around the world build a safer, more efficient enterprise. For more information: visit centrak.com.