By monitoring conditions like temperature and humidity, healthcare workers can limit and reduce microbial growth, thereby decreasing the potential of HAIs.

Ensuring sterile surgical environments
During surgical procedures, it’s critical that the medical instruments required have been properly sterilized beforehand, and RTLS’ capabilities in asset and medical scope management provide physicians greater certainty that the sterilization process has been followed and the possibility of an infection through improper cleaning has been eliminated.

In addition, air quality is another exogenous factor that should be considered when performing surgery. During surgery, dust particles, textile fibers, skin cells, and respiratory aerosols loaded with viable microorganisms are released from the surgical team and the surrounding air into the operating room suite; putting patient and healthcare worker safety at risk. Certain location-based monitoring solutions can also test air quality and alert users to anything out of the ordinary, including ventilation system failure, thus ensuring that one less opportunity for infection is resolved.

Finding the cause
Contact-tracing technology lets anyone with access track nearly every movement of a patient at a moment’s notice. Using RTLS in this way can track a patient’s current location within the facility, where they have been, who they’ve come in contact with, and even what equipment has been used on them – a level of transparency that has proven to be critical to an organization’s infection-control initiatives.

In the case of an outbreak emergency, this type of solution can reduce panic and jump-start a plan of action for a facility. Understanding who the patient has been in contact with, and when, dictates the response and minimizes confusion during an unfortunate situation. Further, the data gathered from contact tracing begins at the infected person(s) and works backward to determine where the infection came from. Finding a source and containing it before it spreads can save facilities time, resources and lives.

Managing assets and medical scope
Similar to contact tracing, asset and medical scope management allows staff to track the location and usage of medical equipment. Some of this information, like which medical instrument was used on which patient, can also help to reduce the incidence of HAIs. It can track what equipment has been cleaned and which items must still be sanitized or discarded, helping to prevent contaminated equipment from ever being used on patients.

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