TAGNOS - Hospital Efficiency Innovation

TAGNOS provides continuous visibility to a hospital’s assets and patients using location tracking. While this in itself is a significant benefit, saving hospitals a great many staff hours spent locating assets and patients, this is just the beginning. TAGNOS applications takes this benefit to another level by using location information to track and monitor various processes in the hospital. An example is the TAGNOS PFM (Patient Flow application) which not only tells where a patient is at any given time, but also uses contextual information to determine where the patient is in the overall treatment process, how long it took to complete each step, and what steps are remaining. Any delays in the steps are flagged immediately, and hospital staff is notified. This level of application intelligence allows hospitals to improve patient throughput, asset and staff utilization, and overall patient satisfaction, whether in the outpatient department, surgery department, or emergency department.

The TAGNOS solution is an enterprise-ready patient management product that is completely hardware-agnostic. It can use either RFID or the newer ultrasound tracking technology to identify where patients are in their treatment processes, and alerts staff to delays that are likely to result in compromised patient care and inefficient use of treatment rooms or hospital staff. By using TAGNOS, a hospital can improve critical processes, enhance safety, and reduce costs. In essence, TAGNOS allows a hospital to be in control of its essential revenue-producing and most expensive activities.

The following example is based on a true story. An open heart surgery patient arrives just a few minutes early on the day of surgery. Because the pre-op staff is not ready for him at that moment, he sits in a chair and begins an anxious vigil. Two and one-half hours later, after numerous phone calls around the hospital, and to the patient’s home, the man is located quietly sitting in the waiting room. During the time this patient was “lost”, the operating room staff and surgeon were forced to spend time and energy on unproductive activities. This is an everyday experience in busy surgery centers and usually results in lost revenue, rescheduled procedures and higher costs. In this particular case, it meant a patient left for hours unnoticed and a very frustrated OR staff. TAGNOS can make a difference.