Use of a Real-Time Location System to Understand Resident Location in an Academic Medical Center.

ABSTRACT:

Background

There is great interest in understanding how residents spend their time in the hospital, but traditional time and motion studies are resource intensive and limited in scale.

Objective

We determined whether a real-time location system (RTLS) that uses infrared emitting badges can be used to track resident time and location.

Methods

Residents rotating on an internal medicine service in January 2018 were given the option to wear an RTLS badge. RTLS data were compared to the call schedule for each participating resident in a deidentified manner. Rules were created to identify work periods to be manually reviewed for data integrity. Reviewed work periods where there were extended periods of time without RTLS badge movement (eg, greater than 300 minutes) were exc

SUBMITTER: D'Souza T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6570446 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature