Hey Reader,

📍 Real Time Locator System

Real Time Locator System (RTLS) is a system of distributed sensors used to locate battery power tags that are fixed to something that you want to locate in a building. Sounds simple enough, but it is not. Get ready to play 3d chess!

🛞 The Wheel of Use Cases

Our game starts with spinning the wheel. The vendors will start by showing you a picture with the RTLS in the center of the wheel of use cases that are spokes, surrounding the magic in the middle. If you have employee safety issues the wheel lands on the duress system. If you are struggling with finding equipment it lands on asset management. People getting lost? It lands on wayfinding.

🧮 The ROI Calculator

What all health systems are struggling with are costs so now you add in the ROI calculator. Each use case should benefit from the use cases that preceded it. More sensors equal more sensing and an increase in something called location fidelity. Location fidelity is simply how accurate the system is when compared to the ground truth. There are economies of scale and ROI goes up the more you spend. It’s right there in the ROI calculator.

♟️3d Chess

Now we have to look at the coverage. Location fidelity could be great in a single room but nonexistent elsewhere, so location fidelity does not equal coverage. We see in our ROI calculator that we have a 1M sq ft building and we could spend over $1.00 per sq ft to get room level coverage in the entire building. This ruins the ROI, so we need to play some 3d chess. Each use case is a move on the board that causes another move, or we lose the ROI game. Adding the nurse call cancel use case you need to adapt asset tracking and duress so they can benefit from the move. And it is literally done in 3d!

😲 But We Already Have an RTLS

In a surprise move we find out that our organization has departments with systems that use their own RTLS. Do we transition those to our new RTLS and is it even possible to transition them? They have different tags so do we need to change the tags for everything they track? Should they live on as point solutions or should we replace them. The moves are endless.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑Change the Game

With the digital twin we start with modeling the organization according to workflows and those workflows are modeled as agents. Assets are part of the workflow/agent and we can see more precisely what our RTLS needs to do, to get the best outcome for the workflow. No more, no less. Remember, the agent cycles through perceive-->think-->act. It starts with perceiving location so we use the 4Ps. Position, proximity, presence and possession can be combined to automate just about any workflow. Then we match those requirements with the RTLS capabilities.

🤔 Now What?

Stop spinning the wheel and start with a strategy, but not an IoT or even an LBS strategy. The strategy should be an automation strategy. Let's think workflows not use cases. With the ​digital twin​ modeling we have requirements that can drive sourcing the RTLS. It reveals the blind spots in what we can observe and what we can automate. This doesn’t mean we have to build our own system, but we should know what location-based services mean to the outcomes of our workflows. The digital twin can even facilitate simulations that can help us predict those outcomes. It all starts with a model. Let’s build one together!

Want to learn more about how Care Traffic Control can transform your hospital’s operations? Connect with us at Why Where Matters for personalized insights and strategies.

Until next week,

Paul E Zieske ​Location Based Services Consulting ​​​