New York-based Kontakt.io, a specialist in AI-powered real-time location services (RTLS) for care operations, has devised a way to improve patient flow by automating room turnover and freeing up beds faster.

This increases bed capacity and efficiency, empowering nurses to focus on patient care instead of administrative tasks.

Bed capacity management is a growing concern among hospitals, impacting the top and bottom lines. In Mississippi, for example, hospitals with over 250 licensed beds saw a 7.6% rise in average annual occupancy rates, from 73.1% in 2020 to 80.7% in 2024.

Kontakt.io’s Rapid Room Turnover, part of its Patient Flow (kontakt.io/solutions/healthcare/patient-experience/#patient-flow) offering, uses RTLS and the IoT to detect discharges in real time. This helps hospitals expedite room cleaning workflows, increase capacity and drive greater bed use. Unnecessary wait times and extended length of stay are no longer problems.

Several major national health systems are piloting the Rapid Room Turnover offering with proven results and positive feedback.

By cutting up to 50% from the typical two-hour discharge process, a 200-bed hospital can achieve clear, rapid RoI, including $1.52m in additional annual revenue, 4.17% increase in patient capacity, and 760 additional patients per year.

The traditional discharge process relies on nurses manually updating electronic health records (EHRs) to indicate a patient has been discharged and the room is ready for cleaning. However, with their focus on patient care, nurses often face delays in notifying environmental services, stalling the discharge workflow. As a result, patient rooms frequently sit empty and idle, delaying admissions, reducing patient satisfaction, and hindering capacity optimisation and bed use.

To address this, Rapid Room Turnover uses Bluetooth LE tags to provide real-time visibility into patient movement, detecting when a patient has been physically discharged. Environmental services teams are then automatically notified to initiate room cleaning, streamlining and accelerating the discharge process without disrupting staff members’ existing workflows.

“Patient discharge – the final step in a patient’s journey – is one of the most obvious waste items in patient flow, causing operational inefficiencies such as unnecessary wait times and extended length of stay,” said Rom Eizenberg, head of product innovation at Kontakt.io. “Rapid Room Turnover helps hospitals unlock faster RoI through greater capacity while freeing up nurses from tedious admin tasks to focus on bedside care.”

Since 2013, Kontakt.io has provided technology to more than 32,000 end users, delivered via 1200 partners, and deployed four million IoT devices in the field.