The start of a new year is the perfect time to reassess how your organization uses technology to drive efficiency, safety, and better outcomes—and your Real-Time Location System (RTLS) should be at the top of that list.
Just as individuals set resolutions to improve their personal lives, healthcare organizations should set intentional goals for their healthcare RTLS strategy to ensure they’re maximizing ROI, improving workflows, and adapting to changing operational demands.
If your RTLS has been running on autopilot, now is the time to take a more strategic approach. These five healthcare RTLS resolutions outline RTLS best practices that can help transform real-time location data into measurable operational improvements.
A Successful Healthcare RTLS Strategy Should Focus On:
- Regular review of RTLS use cases
- Actionable RTLS data analytics
- Broad user adoption across departments
- Intelligent, role-based alerting
- Scalable, enterprise-ready RTLS design
Resolution #1: Review RTLS Use Cases Quarterly
Why It Matters
Healthcare organizations are constantly evolving. Departments expand, workflows change, service lines are added, and new challenges emerge. An RTLS deployment that met your needs a few years ago may no longer align with today’s operational reality.
Regular use case reviews ensure your enterprise RTLS platform continues to deliver value as your organization grows and changes.
The Challenge
Many healthcare systems implement RTLS to solve a specific problem—such as asset tracking, staff safety, or temperature monitoring—and then rarely revisit the system. Meanwhile, other departments face challenges RTLS could solve, but they’re unaware the capability exists.
Your Action Plan
Schedule quarterly RTLS stakeholder reviews that include:
- Clinical operations (nursing, clinical engineering)
- Facilities and environmental services
- IT and security
- Finance and administration
During each session:
- Review current RTLS use cases and performance metrics
- Identify new operational pain points
- Explore where real-time visibility could improve workflows
- Retire alerts or workflows that no longer add value
- Document decisions and outcomes
Pro tip: Align these reviews with budget planning cycles to support funding for RTLS optimization or expansion.
Resolution #2: Use RTLS Data Analytics to Drive Operational Decisions
Why It Matters
Your healthcare RTLS generates massive volumes of data every day. When properly analyzed, this data becomes strategic intelligence—not just location tracking.
RTLS analytics can validate staffing decisions, uncover inefficiencies, justify capital purchases, and support compliance initiatives.
The Challenge
Many organizations rely heavily on real-time alerts but underutilize historical RTLS data such as movement patterns, dwell times, and utilization rates. This leaves significant ROI on the table.
Your Action Plan
Make RTLS data analysis a monthly habit:
- Export reports from your RTLS platform (such as AiRISTA’s sofia ) including:
- Equipment utilization with maintenance status and dwell
- Staff safety response times
- Movement patterns and congestion zones
- Temperature excursion frequency and duration
- Analyze trends and anomalies:
- Where are asset shortages occurring?
- Which equipment sits idle most often?
- Are response times consistent across locations?
- Turn insights into action:
- Right-size asset inventory
- Redesign inefficient workflows
- Support capital requests with data
- Optimize staffing and resource deployment
Example: One hospital used RTLS asset utilization data to redistribute assets across units, eliminating shortages and avoiding $75,000 in rental costs.
Resolution #3: Expand RTLS User Adoption Across Departments
Why It Matters
An enterprise RTLS investment only delivers maximum ROI when it’s broadly adopted. Many healthcare organizations engage just a fraction of the teams that could benefit from real-time visibility.
Each unused department represents missed operational improvement.
The Challenge
RTLS deployments often begin with high-priority use cases, then stall. Staff turnover and lack of ongoing training further limit adoption—even in departments that were initially engaged.
Your Action Plan
Conduct a structured RTLS adoption assessment:
- Identify departments that could benefit but aren’t actively using RTLS:
- Security and safety teams
- Facilities and space management
- Supply chain and inventory
- Quality and compliance
- Start with quick wins that solve clear, painful problems
- Provide department-specific training focused on real workflows
- Create internal RTLS champions
- Incorporate RTLS training into onboarding
- Track adoption metrics such as active users and feature usage
Pro tip: Lead with outcomes, not features. Eliminating 20 minutes of equipment searching resonates more than talking about accuracy specs.
Resolution #4: Optimize RTLS Alerts to Reduce Alert Fatigue
Why It Matters
Alert fatigue undermines even the best RTLS deployments. Too many notifications—or poorly designed alerts—cause staff to ignore critical warnings.
An optimized RTLS alert strategy ensures alerts are relevant, actionable, and role-based.
The Challenge
Over time, alert rules drift. Thresholds become outdated, escalation paths break, and temporary alerts never get retired. Without regular review, alerts become noise instead of value.
Your Action Plan
Conduct an RTLS alerts audit:
- Inventory all active alerts and rules
- Evaluate relevance, accuracy, actionability, and escalation paths
- Retire outdated alerts
- Update thresholds to reduce false positives
- Consolidate overlapping alerts
- Test escalation workflows
Document clear guidelines for when alerts are necessary versus when dashboard monitoring is sufficient.
Resolution #5: Plan for Scalable, Enterprise RTLS Growth
Why It Matters
Healthcare organizations expand continuously—new buildings, service lines, acquisitions, and technology initiatives all impact RTLS performance.
A proactive, scalable RTLS strategy prevents costly retrofits and coverage gaps.
The Challenge
RTLS is often excluded from early planning discussions, leading to reactive deployments and unplanned expenses.
Your Action Plan
CMake RTLS part of strategic planning:
Meet with your RTLS provider, AiRISTA, early to discuss:
- Facility expansions and renovations
- Equipment growth
- System integrations
- Regulatory requirements
- Technology refresh cycles
Conduct a capacity assessment:
- Tag availability
- Sensor coverage
- Network readiness
- User licensing
Embed RTLS requirements into new initiatives from day one.
Evaluate new RTLS capabilities and integrations.
Align expansion planning with annual budgets.
Pro tip: RTLS providers bring cross-industry insight that can strengthen your planning decisions.
Turning RTLS Resolutions into Results
The difference between resolutions and results is execution.
- Assign ownership for each RTLS initiative
- Schedule reviews, audits, and data analysis sessions
- Start with high-impact priorities
- Measure outcomes with clear metrics
- Celebrate and share successes
Your Partner in Healthcare RTLS Success
At AiRISTA, we help healthcare organizations optimize, expand, and future-proof their enterprise RTLS strategies. From use case reviews and RTLS analytics to alert optimization and growth planning, our team is committed to maximizing the value of your real-time location system.
Ready to turn your RTLS resolutions into measurable results? Contact your AiRISTA account team or email salesinfo@airista.com to schedule a strategic RTLS optimization session.
What healthcare RTLS goals are you prioritizing this year? Share your thoughts or connect with our team—we’d love to hear from you.
About The Author
