Healthcare Providers Can Improve Patient Experience with Location Data

Healthcare providers are challenged every day with providing customer care that meets each individual need. With location data, healthcare providers can help to accelerate patient care in multiple parts of their organization. Providers can use location data to enrich and standardize their database to ensure it contains accurate location information to help improve interoperability between healthcare systems.

Physicians providing in-house medical care can use location data to optimize driving routes between a departure point and one or more destinations. This can reduce travel time and ensure physicians are routed to the right location.

Additionally, medical assets can be tracked to prevent theft and locate misplaced devices to help increase staff productivity, accelerate patient volumes seen, and improve patient response times. Healthcare providers can then take location data and visualize their data on a map to identify patterns and relationships, to help make more informed decisions.

Use cases for location data

With location data, healthcare providers can solve for three challenges:

1. Standardize patient database
2. Route optimization
3. Tracking assets

Standardize patient database: Operational inefficiency can negatively impact staff productivity if teams are spending time standardizing address formats, doing address searches, and flagging incorrect addresses for manual review. This can cost healthcare providers thousands of wasted hours and delay individual care if medical providers are unable to confirm where to send prescriptions or medical bills.

Using geocoding with Amazon Location Service Places index healthcare providers can convert text, such as a patient’s address and zip code, into a set of geographic coordinates to confirm the accuracy of a patient’s address. A patient’s address can be plotted on a map to visualize and identify patterns to help accelerate business decisions, or used for further analysis.

By having a standardized database of patient addresses, it not only helps healthcare providers optimize their costs, but helps to improve the database’s performance and reduce latency.

Route optimization: For healthcare providers who furnish in-house calls for non-medical emergencies, calculating the optimal drive time between multiple stops can help lead to timely care. This can minimize the drive time for each staff member―to help reduce driver fatigue and maximize the number of patients they can care for. Patients can also be notified when each house call arrives using geofencing in Amazon Location with Amazon EventBridge, as well as view their status on a map to track their estimated arrival time.

Tracking assets: When assets are unavailable for patient use, medical staff must search for wheel chairs, IV poles, translator devices, or otoscopes that have either been misplaced, stolen or not properly returned to its original place. The time spent searching for these medical assets reduces the amount of time staff can spend caring for patients―reducing staff productivity.

Healthcare providers can leverage Internet of Things (IoT) device trackers and location data to track and view the location on a tablet to precisely help medical staff identify where medical assets are.

Conclusion

As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve, providing customer care that meets each patient’s needs and expectations will be a growing challenge. With location data,  healthcare providers can standardize patient data, improve routing and delivery of medical services, and monitor medical assets. This can help accelerate staff productivity, increase patient volumes seen and improve patient response times.

If you’re interested in learning more about building, adding location data or integrating location data into your applications for different healthcare uses cases, you can learn more at Amazon Location Service.

To know what AWS can do for you, contact your AWS Representative.

Further Reading

• Database enrichment: Access Amazon Location Service from Amazon Aurora
• Route optimization: Amazon Location Service enables matrix routing to optimize route planning
• Tracking assets: Simulated location data with Amazon Location Service