COVID-19 Prevention: Contact Tracing with Real-Time Location Services for Hospital Providers
Traditional contact tracing is desperately in need of a technology overhaul. The COVID-19 global pandemic has shed light on the highly manual practices associated with finding the infected and limiting exposure. New technologies can help healthcare providers and public health officials win the race against the spread of virulent diseases by using real-time location services (RTLS), computer automation, and big data for successful contact tracing and virus mitigation. This article will shed light on modern RTLS contact tracing platforms with COVID-19 as a use case.
Understanding the need for RTLS contact tracing
The magnitude of the challenge is clear: determine who has a virus, trace the potential exposure, and alert everyone that the individual has come in contact with to manage and contain the spread of the virus. That’s the basic philosophy behind contact tracing, which seeks to isolate individuals to stop the spread of a virus. The hope is that this practice will give the biomedical community time to find a cure for the disease while public health officials work to slow it down.
In the past, contact tracing has required cooperation between local and state health departments working to control communicable illnesses like sexually transmitted diseases, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), ebola, measles, or other illnesses. In traditional contact tracing, trained health professionals interview the infected person to determine who he or she may have been in contact with, and then track individuals down to inform them that they may have been exposed. It’s one of the best practices of preventive medicine, but it’s also laborious and slow.
Although this may have worked well in the past, today’s unprecedented global pandemic requires a faster and more efficient approach.
COVID-19 application: How RTLS contact tracing works
The COVID-19 pandemic is both airborne and highly contagious, and unfortunately, the traditional contact tracing method is ineffective as a means to deal with the scope of this problem. Luckily, technology is stepping up as an effective way to slow the spread of COVID-19 by applying real-time location services (RTLS) to help scale the response.
Contact Tracing software provides critical information to health officials faster than the traditional, manual process. This technology can mitigate risk to people, equipment, and entire facilities. Pair contact tracing software with RTLS hardware and you have a recipe for faster implementation of quarantine protocols.
The software works with real-time location remote sensors tagged to equipment, healthcare staff badges, and patient identification bracelets. In the event of a crisis, automated reporting can pinpoint the location of the infected person and everyone that has encountered him or her in your facility. This allows staff to take immediate action, whether it is to quarantine exposed individuals or disinfect equipment.
Contact tracing software can help health officials use real-time tools to:
Determine the names and locations of individuals and assets in proximity to the infected person.
Determine the contact exposure duration with start and end times.
Segment this data by user-defined risk levels based on the contact duration.
Pinpoint “at-risk” areas or rooms within a facility for quarantining. This is important not only to slow the spread of a contagion but to avoid unnecessary facility shutdowns.
Provide the contact phone number for each potentially exposed person.
Send alerts to these individuals by text and email.
Contact tracing can help healthcare officials respond quickly during a crisis, offering secondary and tertiary tracking capabilities to pinpoint individuals or assets that were indirectly impacted by disease. The software also can support user-based reporting and access to powerful business analytics tools such as Tableau for data visualization.
Benefits of RTLS contact tracing software
Automating manual contact tracing will allow real-time visibility that can help healthcare officials develop a faster response plan to mitigate risk from exposure of infectious diseases. For example, it can be used to inform a communication strategy that is updated with the most current details about a serious health crisis.
Ultimately, contact tracing software stops the potential spread of a contagious disease by identifying hospital hot spots of infection, improving safety, security, and public health. When an outbreak occurs, patient flow is often higher, creating increased demand for critical equipment. Instead of running around looking for an IV pump or ventilator, the best RTLS contact tracing software allows end-users to run a report to see what equipment is available (and disinfected) and where it is located.
These tools can even be used to remind healthcare workers to wash their hands throughout the day. An RTLS badge can not only help remind staff of hygiene procedures at critical moments, but it also can automate common procedures such as flagging personnel when a bed becomes unoccupied, which improves the flow of infected patients through a hospital.
To prevent the spread of infection it’s important to quickly locate staff, patients, and equipment that have been in contact with a diagnosed individual. Empowering caregivers with real-time information helps organizations respond more quickly in the event of a local, regional, national, or even global disease outbreak. Talk to our team about how contact tracing software can improve your response to COVID-19 — and beyond.
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