With the aim of surfacing more useful and comprehensive data for hospitals, Stanley Healthcare has released a new “visual business intelligence platform,” called MobileView Analytics, for its AeroScout real-time location system (RTLS) solutions. Using data visualization technology from Tableau Software, the new product offers a set of real-time status and retrospective analysis dashboards. The new product encompasses all of the company’s RTLS solutions, including AeroScout patient flow, asset management, environmental monitoring, and hand hygiene compliance monitoring.

In an interview with 24×7, Stanley’s senior healthcare solutions director Joel Cook explained that most users of AeroScout’s systems have focused on real-time applications. “In the current version of MobileView, most people will delete their data after about 30 days,” he said. “It hasn’t been thought that the data was very useful more than a few days in arrears.” And while reporting on par levels and inventories was useful, “getting a modification to one of those reports was sometimes difficult and time-consuming.”

Working with Tableau Software, the company has built “a set of real-time and retrospective dashboards around what’s going on with fleets of assets. We want to be able to use this software to understand a product lifecycle and to be able to do something about it,” Cook said.

Stanley Healthcare director of product management Laura Hazan added that the AeroScout system creates “tons” of key data about asset usage. “We’ve known all along that it is kind of buried in the database,” she said. The new analytics software “gives that data the ability to tell its story, and to become visual and interactive.”

According to the company, new “out-of-the-box” dashboards for its asset management solution include the following types of data:

  • Real-time visual par levels.
  • Real-time inventory status including asset allocation, distribution, and utilization.
  • Asset utilization rates to help understand the effectiveness of current asset utilization, address potential equipment shortages, and minimize rental costs.
  • Real-time workflow for clinical engineering to help identify, diagnose and address process delays and improve safety.

Cook predicts that customers will use the data “for years now, instead of months or days.” He added that the company has “been doing a lot of work around computerized maintenance management systems” and other hospital databases to integrate data so that users can now see, for instance, product recall information in the MobileView dashboard. Users will be able to “ask questions of the data, form hypotheses, and test them in real time,” he said. With the new dashboards, Cook added, “now, for the first time really, we’re beginning to unleash this data.”

Stanley Healthcare’s MobileView Analytics and will be showcased at the HIMSS 2015 Conference, April 13–15, 2015, in Chicago. For more information, visit the Stanley Healthcare website.