Reducing time to find medical equipment by 75% at Waterloo's biggest hospital
Timeline
6 months
Role
Co-design Intern
Trackmate is an affordable real time location solution designed with staff to help locate medical equipment quickly and with ease.
The Problem(s)
Staff can't find the equipment they need…
Staff at WRHN commonly reported ongoing challenges with locating, accessing, and managing shared medical equipment, making it more difficult for them to care for their patients.
76.5%
of staff agreed or strongly agreed that Equipment availability issues disrupt their workflow.
However, managers and leadership will vouch that there is enough equipment, rather, the problem lies with accessing it. As hospitals face decreased budgets, it becomes more important for them to be able to use what equipment they have more effectively and efficiently.
“Every time [they] come say there's no IV pumps in the building … we run numbers and no more than 25% are in use."
Manager, WRHN @ Queen's Boulevard
Another problem exists with managers and leadership having little information about the equipment they already have, making it difficult to make informed purchasing decisions about what equipment they may need to buy or replace.
The Solution
How Trackmate helps staff find medical equipment
In partnership with Sparq IoT, the CareNext team and WRHN implemented Trackmate across 4 floors of the Queen's Boulevard site for a 6 month pilot.
Trackmate tags were placed on 180 pieces of medical equipment, allowing staff to use a dashboard to quickly search for and find them across various floors.
The average time spent locating equipment decreased ~75% when using Trackmate (from 22 to 5 minutes)
Staff that reported that they often spend time searching or walking between rooms and floors to locate equipment decreased by 29.4%
Trackmate also helps managers and leadership, providing them with information about equipment usage and dwell times, allowing them to make more informed decisions based on how often equipment might be used and shared across units.
"[Trackmate] saves a lot of time when you’re trying to find something."
Physiotherapist, WHRN @ Queen's Boulevard
The Process
The decisions I made that shaped the project
As one of the project leads, I was responsible for making many of the major design decisions that shaped the project, including:
How do we train staff to use Trackmate?
How might the UI change in a clinical context?
What equipment do we track?
How do we remove login friction?
Looking Back
What I learned
Healthcare moves slowly until it doesn’t! We’d often get held up by contracts, scheduling or something else, and then suddenly we were ready to hit the road. This meant that it was important to always be prepared and ready to move at the drop of dime.
Not to assume technological literacy, especially in a fast moving (and often at times, rigid) space like healthcare. This created some bumps in the road, but it's an important lesson I'm carrying forward, especially in a social services context, as a wide variety of people means a wide range of tech literacy.
Thanks to the amazing CareNext team who helped me learn and grow!