This Startup Wants to Make Real-Time Location Services Accessible & Affordable for All Healthcare Facilities

Irvine, CA (April 2022) Each year, hospitals can lose up to $4,000 per bed while one third of nurses spend, on average, one hour of time simply searching for the equipment or supplies needed for patient care. Moreover, the perceptions generated by online customer sentiment (reviews) regarding their experience and care have become driving forces for attracting patients to healthcare facilities. PenguinIn, is solving these pain points by making RTLS solutions more accessible and affordable for all healthcare facilities.

Real-time Location Services (RTLS) has shown to have a positive impact on resolving these pain points. The challenge is the perception of RTLS as a "luxury or nice to have solution" of questionable return on investment. The costs of deploying existing RTLS hardware systems is expensive, complex, and highly specialized using proprietary hardware, resulting in higher cost per tracked asset and only mild adoption (just 10-30% of U.S. hospitals have RTLS systems).

Mohammed Smadi, CEO of PenguinIN, an indoor positioning software as a service company, says this perception is not necessarily wrong, but there is a better, more affordable way. "Many of today's indoor wayfinding and tracking solutions tend to degrade in performance because they exist in hardware that must be maintained and even replaced over time," said Smadi. "Healthcare facilities need the software that can easily connect with their current infrastructure. They shouldn't have to take on the additional expense of building a new infrastructure just for RTLS."

PenguinIN is the indoor positioning system that easily connects to a facility's existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to track and locate the key items and supplies that staff need to provide the best care and experience to patients while giving facility managers a new tool to streamline operations.
RTLS Can Be Both Affordable and More Effective for Healthcare Facilities

Mohammed believes that RTLS should be accessible for all facilities, and more accurate by;

• Leveraging existing infrastructure to allow for affordable RTLS
• Better technology (more accurate, stable and faster time-to-initial-location)
• Offering a much easier and intuitive interface which is highly customizable
• Providing a managed service, leaving behind the clunky, expensive hardware
• Offering a more holistic solution:
o Most RTLS solution providers do not have wayfinding technology
o Most wayfinding technology providers do not offer RTLS (i.e., tracking) solution
o PenguinIN offers both

And better, more impactful results for healthcare facilities

• Improved operational efficiency (staff time)
o Automating mundane tasks and reduce time spent looking for supplies
• Informed decision make: (e.g., measure asset utilization - make purchases for what you need exactly)
• Improved patient experience (e.g., shorter wait times, improved service and outcomes)
o PenguinIN can even improve the patient experience and outcome in emergency rooms by tracking how long they've waited and how long a physician has spent with the patient
o Nurses' stations can use it to track patient requests and even food deliveries
• Improved customer sentiment (e.g., tools to help gauge and improve patient satisfaction)
• Safer environment (duress calls, theft prevention, facility management)
o Facilities can track air quality including dust, temperature and possible water leaks

And that's not all. Smadi says that PenguinIN is currently fitting the largest national guard hospital in Saudi Arabia with its system with the goal of reducing missed appointments by patients. In the U.S., missed appointments are said to cost practices and facilities $200 each and cost the industry roughly $150 billion.

"The impetus behind PenguinIn is to truly help these facilities operate better and more efficiently, save money and time all while improving employee satisfaction and patient experience and care," Smadi says. "These all go hand in hand and often one gets priority over another because of budget. We're putting an end to that."

Jennifer Fortney
jfortney@cascadecomms.com
773/991-8109

PenguinIn
7700 Irvine Center Drive
Irvine, CA 92618

About PenguinIN
PenguinIN is the indoor positioning system that easily connects to a healthcare facility's existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to track and locate the key items and supplies that staff need to provide the best care to patients while also giving facility managers a new tool to streamline operations. The company is part of the Cicso Meraki ecosystem, making the software an "out of the box", affordable and easy to deploy option for healthcare facilities. PenguinIN.com

This release was published on openPR.