A High-Tech Approach to Stemming the Spread of Coronavirus in Healthcare Facilities
Healthcare facilities might be especially vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19 (coronavirus). One of the biggest fears in healthcare is not just that COVID-19 will spread undetected, but that it will require quarantining of healthcare workers, decimating the workforce most needed as more cases are reported. This has already happened in California, leading to the quarantine of over 200 workers for a single case.
The good news is that digital health solutions are on the rise, offering more and more ways to support critical healthcare professionals, patients, or even visitors in a medical facility. This post looks specifically at how location and tracking technology can help mitigate the risks COVID-19 and other infectious diseases pose.
This isn’t a new topic. It was a hot focus of conversation five years ago, when staggering stats on Ebola were still pouring in. Back then, however, there were fewer viable options for how technology could help. Today, solutions for tracking and monitoring the spread of infection can help prevent unneeded quarantining, reduce costs, and save lives.
But how do these tracking technologies help?
1. HAIs and COVID-19
One of the big concerns right now is how infectious COVID-19 seems to be and how hard it really is to track its spread. This can be especially concerning for people familiar with healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). The Center for Disease Control has estimated that close to 1 in 25 hospitalized patients contract an HAI, with close to 100,000 people dying from HAIs each year.
COVID-19 seems to be spread person-to-person, typically within 6 feet or so. One evident mechanism of transmission is “respiratory droplets” spread when someone sneezes or coughs. There’s also evidence that the virus is aerosolizing to some degree, risking much more exposure via asymptomatic person-to-person contact, contaminated surfaces, and other means.
2. RTLS and the WISER Locator
What if we knew precisely who interacted with whom, or which areas were likely to be contaminated?
When the spread of disease and antibiotic-resistant infections in hospitals generated so much buzz a few years ago, people frequently discussed it in conjunction with real-time location systems (RTLS). The idea is that knowing where key items and personnel, visitors, or patients are in real time can help map out the spread of infection—or at the very least provide actual data to help prevent that spread.
If, for instance, we know that Doctor Y in room 201 treated Patient Z, who has an infectious disease, then we know which room and which people to monitor or disinfect. And if Doctor Y then spent the next hour with Patients X and W in room 203, we can start tracing things in the event that an infection does spread. That’s where WISER comes in.
WISER Systems provides real-time tracking and location, accurate within a few inches in most settings. WISER's ATLAS uses a system of small, lightweight devices, including tracking tags which can be worn, carried, or attached to most physical assets. This makes it easy to track people such as medical staff, patients, or visitors in hospitals. It also records granular, time-stamped trails of where each person has been, and for how long.
WISER’s Locator also allows end users to establish precise geofences. This could delineate a ward, an individual room, or even just a fraction of a room. Geofences can also overlap as needed. These geofences help ensure that patients are sent to the right area in conjunction with triage, or that individuals don’t leave mandatory containment areas.
3. Benefits and use-cases in healthcare
By gathering in-the-moment location data, infection preventionists or hospital administrators can get an accurate, up-to-date picture of what’s happening. The goal is really to protect the people inside a healthcare facility and to deliver better care. There are a few basic ways RTLS like WISER’s Locator supports this:
Generating accurate, time-stamped data on who interacts with whom; this encompasses facility staff, patients, and visitors.
Creating a detailed trail of association between patients, care providers, and facility staff.
Autonomously tracking items and areas that could be associated with the spread of infection.
Geofencing physical spaces likely to be contaminated, or issuing warnings when someone enters an area marked for disinfection.
Providing data to build probability models for further infection.
A few use-cases lend themselves especially well to reducing the spread of infection in healthcare facilities. One is that RTLS can become an automated audit tool for isolation protocols or location-based hygiene practices. Use of the WISER Locator’s geofences can demarcate who is allowed to go where—or even who is required to go where, in the case of protocol. It can also flag infected areas in advance of more visitors entering them without protective equipment like gloves, eye-gear, and masks. Because WISER’s location data is always time-stamped, users can generate time-based triggers if an item or person stays too long in any particular geofence or in proximity with any other object or person.
Decontamination protocols are another use case. For instance, some medical implements like flexible endoscopes are routinely associated with the spread of HAIs. If, however, end users also track whether implements like endoscopes have moved through their disinfection process, they can significantly mitigate new risks of disease spread. Since WISER’s Locator can locate and track both people and objects, it can simultaneously support decontamination protocols for both, including visitors or healthcare workers who might need to be disinfected.
These same protocols and practices will be key in nursing homes and assisted living facilities as well. This is especially important since these types of environments have already shown to be particularly vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19, and older populations of patients tend to face much greater risks of serious illness or death from infection.
Analyzing the data will of course allow the discovery of many other trends and patterns, both related to medical interventions and to process improvements. If the data is integrated with electronic health record (EHR) systems, there’s even more chance of generating valuable preventative warnings and making sense of the data in an actionable way—although WISER’s data can also be anonymized for privacy or compliance reasons.
While tracking and location in healthcare settings is ultimately about protecting people and offering higher quality healthcare, it will also help significantly reduce operating costs. For example, helping identify which areas—and people—might need to be decontaminated and which will not could save vast amounts of time, effort, and money.
4. The technology in practice
WISER has validated its Locator system in hospitals, assisted living and nursing home facilities, and many other operational environments.
Outside of healthcare, one of Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies used WISER’s RTLS to track visitors in secure areas. End-customers have also used the WISER Locator for safety applications tracking whether individuals remain in a single work station too long, for accountability of small hand tools and checkout / check-in protocols, and for operational analyses of where workers move in proximity to each other and their work areas.
In sum
During a pandemic, containment is a top priority while researchers work to make vaccines available. The safety of healthcare professionals in close contact with affected individuals is also paramount. For situations like this, RTLS isn’t the ultimate cure. What it does is quantify motion in time to help manage infection, reduce spread, and protect lives.
Singapore’s National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) announced last year that they were implementing RTLS to help identify and reduce disease outbreak—specifically analyzing whether tracking tags came within two meters of one another. This didn’t prevent infection, but the center’s Health minister Gan Kim Yong said that it “made possible the diagnosis of [a] patient’s monkeypox within 24 hours of his arrival at the NCID.”
The same kinds of benefits can be realized now—and to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases in the future.
Post by Stephen Taylor, Director of Communications at WISER Systems, Inc.