On time delivery of patients to clinical appointments is essential for the efficient operation of those departments. The Patient Transport System© contains a database, and various communication interfaces to automate tasks that are necessary to ensure that patients being moved between their rooms and clinical departments arrive on time. These tasks include data entry and record keeping, trip scheduling, and trip progress reporting. PTS has been designed to help avoid conflicts when scheduling patient trips, to coordinate multiple trips in order to minimize patient transports, and to speed up discharge notification.
Other PTS benefits include:
Productivity increases for nurses, clinical department personnel and transportation staff
Improved coordination between nursing units and diagnostic departments
Increase in patient satisfaction
Patient and Material Transportation
PTS can also be used to efficiently move equipment, materials, linens, specimens, and other items. The PTS system collects, organizes and reports information that enables managers to identify their response times, demand volumes by time of day and department/unit, recurring delay causing bottlenecks, and to measurePatient Transportation employee efficiency, utilization, and productivity. The PTS system provides the capability to improve efficiency, to enhance service levels with the same resources, or to reduce costs while maintaining service levels.
Patient Transporting benefits:
On-Time Delivery – The automation of the transportation process, based on industrial engineering principles, optimizes the on-time delivery of patients, which can easily get slowed down by manual entries into a hospital information system.
Reduce Staff Costs – Staff costs are reduced through automation of the communication processes relating to trip requests, dispatching, and trip progress monitoring.
Accurate Employee Evaluations – Data about individual employee productivity allows for accurate employee evaluations and the development of effective training programs.
Patient Tracking
Hospitals want to track where a patient is located and when that location is being changed. PTS provides patient tracking information to hospital visibility systems, including the patient’s last known location and when the patient was there, whether the patient is in transit, the destination location and expected arrival time, and whether the patient is being transferred or discharged.
Patient Tracking benefits:
Proactive Management – Information about pending transports and current activities of employees enable proactive management adjustments relating to staffing levels and assignments.
Scheduling Adjustments – Real-time information about the progress of patients coming to diagnostic areas allows scheduling adjustments in the event of delays.
Better Bed Management – Quicker notification of patient discharges and transfers results in reduced bed turnaround times, increased bed availability and the opportunity for increased bed utilization and revenue.
Positive ROI for Smaller Hospitals
The automation provided by PTS results in significant time savings related toPatient Tracking requesting, dispatching and checking on trip progress and increased available bed-days which, in some cases, can be turned into increased revenues from greater bed utilization. This is true for a 100 bed hospital just as it is true for a 550 bed hospital, although at a different scale. Pricing for PTS is also scaled to assure that small hospitals realize a return on investment just like large hospitals.
Learn more about patient tracking and transportation for small hospitals.