Running a hospital efficiently requires knowing where your patients are at all times. That's where TeleTracking does its business. The company helps hospitals understand their patient flow patterns to optimize care. Jan Mosholt, senior vice president of sales and marketing, presented on this topic during a morning focus group at the Becker's Hospital Review 5th Annual Conference held May 16 in Chicago.
Healthcare reform has reoriented TeleTracking's main focuses somewhat. "For twenty-three years we've been a point solution company, solving specific issues in patient transport, patient placement and bed-turnover, among other things. Over time, we have become an operational platform to manage daily operations," said Mr. Mosholt. "Everyone's faced with the same problems and same cost pressures. In this new era of healthcare it's all about reimbursement rates," he added.
He noted that healthcare is one of the only industries in which stakeholders are expected to run their operations with the clear ability to predict what is going to happen. "That’s where TeleTracking comes in, because we provide visibility for daily operations," he said.
TeleTracking’s solutions are deployed at nearly 900 hospitals and health systems throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The solutions give providers access to real-time data, which can be a useful tool in solving problems like patient bottlenecks, wait times, patient location and more.
As Mr. Mosholt put it, "Capacity management starts with the discharge process."
TeleTracking's most wired client opens an interesting window into this assertion, showing how this automated technology actually affects real people. The hospital in question has applied all of TeleTracking's solutions so that it can generate patient-specific interaction reports, which can discriminate, down to the individual procedure, provider and more, who has interacted with the patient and in what ways.
This kind of detail in tracking technology has the potential to open windows of opportunity into infection control, as well as capacity management.
TeleTracking’s focus remains on streamlining communications about patient flow with real-time data.
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