MEASURING LEADERSHIP ROUNDING PERFORMANCE IN A HOSPITAL ENVIRONMENT USING REAL TIME LOCATION SYSTEMS

Abstract

Among the major industries, healthcare accounts for over ten percent of jobs today and is continuing to grow per the surges of baby boomers requiring more care, rising costs in medicine and equipment, and current legislative changes on the national level. Hospitals are continually reorganizing processes to accommodate for the growth to the cumbersome employee base. As a result, hospitals must adopt lean concepts to remain competitive. It remains a challenge for management and leadership to gauge caregiver performance and discover where inefficiencies lie in the workflow. To maintain quality of care in hospitals, nurse-rounding functions are adopted to provide comfort; pain management, safety, and an increase in overall patient satisfaction. The full rounding model also incorporates the leadership staff to participate in the process. Leadership rounding is pertinent to the rounding process, as it provides an element of upper management providing a more personable engagement with patients and acts as a facet to managing nursing staff the most effective rounding. Effectiveness of nurse rounding has been demonstrated by numerous surveys. One such survey known as the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers, or HCAHPS survey acts as a performance feedback mechanism to measure the patient's quality of care during their stay at the hospital. As the growth in healthcare has increased workloads for nurses and leadership, rounding may be overlooked, which in turn, reduces HCAHPS scores. Since these survey scores dictate certain insurance percentages; much is at stake. There needs to be a mechanism to track rounding in hospitals to confirm these job tasks are being completed (Cayer, 2014). With the emerging technology provided by Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS), hospitals now have the ability to track assets, measure temperatures real-time, and track locations of staff. RTLS has the ability to monitor staff in the busy environment to find bottlenecks in workflow and monitor employee performance. However, the raw data sets are often hard to analyze and need to be converted into a form that is intelligible for managers and various stakeholders. . The purpose of this study is to develop an RTLS rounding tool that ingests and processes RTLS data captured at a local Women and Children's hospital. This study discusses the outcomes of the implementation of the RTLS tool and describes the process of generating customizable reports that can be used by the management to monitor, change, and improve rounding behavior.