Patient and asset location tracking improve healthcare efficiency at leading Catalan hospital

Large hospitals are complex spaces; like small, multi-layered cities they can be complicated to manage and difficult to navigate. Hospital Germans Trias i Pujol – known locally as Can Ruti – is located in Badalona, metropolitan Barcelona, and has 4,100 staff providing care to around 800,000 people.

“If visitors feel lost, they often approach healthcare staff to ask for directions,” explains Xavier Rojas Bou, IT and Systems Director at Gerència Territorial Metropolitana Nord, the hospital’s governing authority. “We needed a system that would make it easier to navigate the hospital’s facilities.”

Improvements to Meet Post-Covid Challenges

One of the largest hospitals in Catalonia, Can Ruti specialises in cardiology and infectious diseases. It is one Europe’s largest health and science campuses, comprising several internationally renowned institutions. Each year it performs around 17,000 surgical procedures and treats 110,000 outpatients.

“If we are to successfully meet the challenges of the post-Covid era, we need to make Can Ruti more flexible. Growth will enable us to provide the coverage and support needed by the entire population. Digital transformation is essential,” says Rojas Bou.

Can Ruti identified two primary pillars for improvement. It needed to improve the end-to-end patient experience, from arriving at the building and finding the relevant testing or treatment rooms. It also sought a tool to help with key aspects of building management, with a view to enhancing the hospital’s overall efficiency.

Introducing the Smart Hospital solution

Having outlined the broad issues to be addressed, Can Ruti turned to Barcelona-based IT services provider, SEMIC. “We carried out a market study to find a supplier that could match what we wanted,” recalls Rojas Bou. “The Aruba approach was judged to be the best. Once the project was approved, it was awarded to SEMIC and Aruba.”

Aruba Meridian technology is the basis of the Smart Hospital by SEMIC solution. It improves various processes, including the admission of patients through an app developed by SEMIC that is linked to the hospital’s management system. Patients are detected upon arrival at the hospital and can make the admission online. Once done, they are guided to their appointment through indoor navigation.

The project is built around 350 Aruba Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) beacons. These provide indoor location and wayfinding functionality as well as proximity-aware push notifications, working in tandem with Aruba Meridian’s cloud-based SaaS access management platform.

“The follow-up with SEMIC and Aruba was excellent,” says Rojas Bou, adding that there was an unexpected difficulty. “The Catalan language was not recognised. This is obviously a very important issue in our region but Aruba helped SEMIC to resolve it quickly and without complications.”

Benefits for Both Patients and Staff

Smart Hospital has transformed the patient experience. The app installed on a patient’s phone detects the presence of the Bluetooth Aruba beacons, triggering a welcome message upon entering the hospital.

The admission process can be completed securely online and the patient then receives details of their appointments for the day, including wait times and notifications of any delays, and an option to change the order of appointments where appropriate. The app then guides the patient to the location of their first appointment, or to a waiting area, bathroom or cafeteria if desired.

“Smart Hospital allows time optimisation,” notes Rojas Bou. “The impact this has on the patient's experience is very positive. There is no comparable system in healthcare, based on real triangulation. We are the first to offer patients anything like this.”

Scope for Extended Deployment

The most exciting aspect of Smart Hospital is its potential. There is scope to extend Smart Hospital’s asset-tracking capabilities and to extend connectivity to IoT-enabled devices. Plans are also in place to enable healthcare personnel to locate colleagues remotely, enabling more efficient staff deployment.

Can Ruti is also looking to extend the system to enhance its ‘virtual waiting room’ functions. Longer-term ambitions include developing remote patient management and telemedicine functionality, enabling medical staff to track patients and symptoms remotely, potentially saving them from having to even visit the hospital.

“Technology makes it possible to automate and outsource processes and monitor patients remotely. We want to do as much as possible outside the physical premises, so patients only need to come to the hospital when absolutely necessary,” concludes Bou. “The ultimate purpose, of course, is always the improvement of patient health.”