Healthcare Matters

It makes sense that the largest and more specialized best in breed SCM vendors keep popping up in the press announcements of major providers.  After all, good SCM practice continues to be linked directly to many of the performance improvements being achieved and talked about by these same hospitals.

Over these past several weeks, I kept finding myself stumbling into news about Teletracking Technologies, a Pittsburgh based real time location services technology (RTLS) company. So when I saw their press announcement this morning confirming that it’s a market leader, well, it all made sense.

Just yesterday we talked about Vendormate and how it has successfully expanded on the market’s original concept for “rep credentialing.” Now, the company is positioned as a full service “vendor information management” company.  And it’s all legit, as Vendormate continues to leverage the data it collects in innovative ways, bringing new applications to market that logically extend and add value to the original concept.

Teletracking is doing the same thing and based on its market penetration, it’s apparently doing it very well. It has taken RTLS technology and charged past the original asset tracking value prop to deliver all kinds of new and value adding/creating applications.

PITTSBURGH (June 14, 2012) – A majority of America’s top hospitals use TeleTracking Technologies (www.teletracking.com) software solutions to manage their physical operations more efficiently, a review of the nation’s top hospital polls revealed.

TeleTracking clients comprised over 80% of hospitals named in the 2012 “Best Hospitals” issue of U.S. News & World Report, and 13 of 17 (76%) “Honor Roll” hospitals, including seven of the top 10.  About half of the 100 hospitals named in Thomson Reuters’ 2012“Top 100” surveyand 62 of Becker’s Hospital Review’s “100 Great Hospitals” use TeleTracking’ s hospital capacity management applications. TeleTracking, the KLAS # 1 ranked leader in patient flow solutions (KLAS), is used in nearly 70% of America’s largest hospitals and almost 200 Magnet-designated hospitals (Magnet), the review showed. In addition, seven of the last eight Malcolm Baldrige Award winning hospitals are TeleTracking clients.

One reason for this may be that patient flow and capacity management is now considered the biggest challenge facing hospitals today, according to a separate TeleTracking survey of 200 hospital leaders from across the nation.

When TeleTracking recently surveyed a cross-section of management representing over 200 hospitals about the biggest challenges faced by their hospitals, the largest single concern, cited by 36 percent of respondents, was getting a patient from point A to point B in a timely and efficient manner. This was followed by the financial outlook (15%) and balancing length of stay with quality care (7%).

“This isn’t surprising to us,” said Michael Gallup, senior vice president of TeleTracking Technologies Inc., commenting on the results. “We’re in business to deliver operational efficiency and intelligence to our clients, and that translates to cost savings, increased revenue, better patient care and higher patient satisfaction.  We demand measurable outcomes from our solutions.”

TeleTracking’s automation software, real-time location technology, and business analytics capabilities deliver optimal, moment-by-moment management of a hospital’s entire physical

enterprise, including every patient, employee, and mobile medical device, giving hospital executives a real-time picture of operations. This allows them to maximize existing capacity, plan for expected capacity demands, achieve precision patient placement and better manage discharges.

“By automating workflows, continually monitoring status, and offering transparency and visibility throughout the enterprise, hospitals can instantly analyze the root causes of process delays and wait times,” Gallup said.  “This means they can intervene any time a process gets bogged down and correct it before a real problem develops”, he added.

—Tom Finn