Centric Consulting helps the Centre for Neuro Skills integrate a beacon technology framework to deliver innovative patient care improvements.
The Centre for Neuro Skills (CNS), a leading provider of rehabilitation services for patients with traumatic and acquired brain injuries, needed an efficient way to monitor the frequency and duration of provider visits. The goal: to optimize provider-to-patient ratios and improve overall patient care.
Because patients at the center reside in environments that require frequent, hands-on interactions from providers, CNS needed technology that could provide insight into patient and provider whereabouts to aid operational awareness and ensure compliance.
Familiar with Centric Consulting’s success implementing Internet of Things (IoT) software to monitor patient care at other healthcare organizations, CNS sought our expertise to integrate similar beacon technology into their own processes.
They partnered with us to form a cross-functional team of clinician, process and technology experts that would work together to integrate Centric’s Bluetooth beacon technology framework, BlueBeak, within their practice. The team focused on delivering innovative, delivery of care improvements through ongoing clinician engagement and rapid quality assurance testing.
Enter Centric: An IoT Approach to Enhance Provider and Patient Interactions
In a matter of weeks, Centric’s team effectively piloted their BlueBeak beacon technology in 12 different CNS rooms. These beacons are low-cost, wireless sensors with unique IP addresses that are mounted on the wall in each room and communicate with Bluetooth-enabled devices. They can detect accurate locations of these devices using GPS, cell phone triangulation, and WiFi proximity.
Leveraging the AWS Cloud, BlueBeak employs a number of AWS technologies including S3 for Storage, EC2 for compute, DynamoDB and Aurora for databases. It utilizes a pub-sub model leveraging SQS and SNS. Its serverless design, utilizing AWS Lambda, gives the system flexibility, scalability, and efficiency.
CNS staff members wear Bluetooth enabled ID badges that interact with the beacons every time they enter and exit a patient room. The beacons then transfer this information to a secure, online dashboard that allows administrators to track the frequency of patient room visits when the next patient room visit is expected, and how much time is being spent by each staff member in a patient’s environment.
This seamless, secure, and easy-to-use digital platform enables administrators to monitor supervisors, nurses and other clinical staff efficiently – without interfering with their daily routines – and ensure patients are getting the right care when and for how long they need it.
The Impact: Better Patient Care with Beacons
Centric has successfully established BlueBeak technology in a dozen patient rooms at the CNS, featuring:
- Simple and intuitive web interface that enables administrators to easily monitor the system
- The ability to record when staff enter and exit the residential and management units, log Medicine Cabinet checks, and monitor staff interaction times in the patient’s environment
- An online dashboard of staff location and data analytics to determine where clinicians and staff are providing the most significant impacts on patients
- A mechanism for monitoring battery life and network connectivity of badges and sensors
- Data to inform patient outcome and perform time studies
- Layers of security for accessing information and ensuring only authorized personnel have the appropriate level of access
CNS is still in its pilot phase with the new BlueBeak beacon technology, and is currently using the dashboard to compile data on patient and provider interactions that can inform enhancements to patient care and compliance.
