Healthcare is one sector where technology is changing every aspect of our lives. Geofencing is one innovative change that has occurred. Ideally, leveraging geographical boundaries and geofencing enables healthcare providers to deliver focused services, encourage maximum patient engagement, and enhance all outcomes.
In this blog, we will delve into the concept, advantages, implementation, and real-world applications of healthcare geofencing.
What is Healthcare Geofencing?
Healthcare geofencing simply means drawing virtual boundaries around geographical areas. These boundaries may be as small as one building or as large as the entire city. Depending on a patient or health provider’s entry or exit through these boundaries, specific actions could be triggered.
What Are The Benefits of Geofencing in Healthcare?
Geofencing offers numerous benefits to healthcare providers and patients. Some of the benefits include:
Enhanced Patient Engagement and Communication
Health care providers can develop a closer relationship with patients with the use of geofencing with personalized, time-appropriate messages. Virtual walls can be set up and sent to the patients’ mobile devices to remind them of appointments or when to take a particular medication at the right time. This way, one gets reminders before time so that appointments that one would have forgotten are not missed.
Geofencing also allows a provider to add location-based messages, such as reminders about available clinics, pharmacies, and/or support groups, that help patients find the resources they require.
Medication Adherence Alerts
Geofencing technology monitors and motivates drug adherence by tracking the patient’s location relative to pharmacies. Providers can then check on the pickup of prescribed drugs by tracking the patient’s location relative to a pharmacy.
If a patient fails to visit a pharmacy at or after a specific time, the geofencing technology can be set to an auto-reminder sequence designed to motivate adherence. This ensures that a missed dose does not become a missed medicine or lead to poor health outcomes.
Improved Operational Efficiency
Geofencing enables the optimization of the operational efficiency of health practitioners. Such locations with high peak traffic times can be identified, and thus, staff should be scheduled during those hours to ensure that specific services are available.
Additionally, you can reduce patient waiting time and improve patient satisfaction. Inventory levels at different locations can also be tracked through geofencing. Hence, specific supplies with certain priority levels never run out, thus reducing stockouts and patient care disturbances.
Better Patient Safety and Monitoring
Geofencing technology can be applied to enhance the safety and monitoring of patients, especially those who may be vulnerable. Geofencing will detect falls among elderly or at-risk patients with wearable devices.
Alerts are immediately provided to caregivers and emergency services in time to prevent serious injuries. It can track the location of at-risk patients who may wander or get lost. This will give caregivers and families a lot of confidence.
Boosted Preventive Care Initiatives
Geofencing can be applied to further support preventive care programs by analyzing location data. Based on this information, providers can identify many populations at risk for specific diseases due to related geographic factors. This allows for targeted outreach and education campaigns pertaining to specific health concerns within communities.
Geofencing can be applied to deliver location-based health promotion campaigns that promote healthy behaviors and preventive screenings.
Streamlined Billing and Payments
Geofencing can make billing and payment processes in any healthcare organization easier. It supports location-based pricing for a telemedicine consultation or a home health visit by providers, ensuring that billing procedures are fair and not transparent.
Moreover, geofencing automates the billing process based on the patient’s location data and the services rendered to them, resulting in less administrative workload and efficiency.
Data-Driven Insights for Population Health
It yields very relevant data-driven insights in population health management. Such a method identifies clusters of cases in specific geographies and thus tracks the spread of diseases for targeted interventions.
Further, analyzing data emanating from geofenced areas could help develop tailored programs to redress the particular needs of populations characterized by health disparities.
How to Implement Geofencing in Healthcare
To implement geofencing efficiently in your healthcare organizations, take note of the following steps:
Define Your Objectives
Be very clear and specific with the objectives that you intend to achieve with geofencing. Consider factors such as improving patient engagement, optimizing medication adherence, or optimizing operations and patient safety for any improvements.
Choose Right Platform
Choose a geofencing platform that fits well to the specific needs of your organization and integrates easily with the existing health care systems.
Additionally, look for features in the selected platform, including location tracking, boundary creation, trigger management, and data analytics. The right platform should also consider scalability, reliability, and ease of use.
Create Virtual Fences
Define the geographies you want to monitor. These can be small, like the boundary of one building, or vast, like the entire city. You can also use mapping tools to visualize and define your boundaries accurately.
Collect data and consider patient demographics, disease prevalence, or service availability while defining boundary locations.
Create Triggers and Actions
Determine how you want to be notified when patients or healthcare providers enter or leave the set boundaries.
Notify, activate alerts, trigger specific workflows in your health system, or consult healthcare marketers to identify what actions need to be performed on the geofencing platform. With their help, you can set up specifically with the goals and outcomes.
Geofencing Integration
Integrate your geofencing system with your electronic health records, patient portals, and all other relevant systems. This will smoothly transfer data and allow the data being geofenced to be used in decision-making and applications. To integrate with APIs, assume an API or one of the other forms of integration methods.
Geotargeting vs. Geofencing in Healthcare: What’s the Difference?
Geotargeting and geofencing do appear to be somewhat similar concepts, but they are used differently in healthcare businesses.
Geotargeting
Geotargeting sends ads or specific content targeted toward users based on their live location. It, therefore, becomes a location-based marketing strategy by which healthcare providers reach particular audiences within a geographic area. It is mainly used in healthcare advertising or healthcare marketing campaigns.
Geofencing
Geofencing is the method of creating virtual barriers around predefined geographic areas. Once mobile devices cross and then leave these boundaries, different triggers are initiated and performed.
Examples of Geofencing Healthcare Campaign
Some examples of how geofencing has been effectively used in healthcare include:
Disease Prevention and Awareness Campaigns
Smoking Cessation
Geofencing can identify high-smoking areas based on demographic, geographic, and regional health statistics. Targeted smoking cessation campaigns can be delivered to these identified regions through mobile device app notifications, SMS messages, or digital billboards. Such campaigns can provide information related to quitting resources, support groups, and available options for nicotine replacement therapy.
Diabetes Prevention
Geospatial analysis can guide service delivery providers to diagnose populations susceptible to diabetes based on socioeconomic status, diet, and physical activity. Relevant diabetes prevention campaigns may be sent via geofencing for this population. These campaigns may include educational materials, healthy recipe ideas, and information about exercise programs.
Health App Promotions
Geofencing can also be used to promote a fitness app to people when they enter an area with several gyms, parks, and recreational centers. Again, the usability factor is maintained since the app is being promoted to those who are likely to be interested in the activity.
Through geofencing, you can find regions with high-stress levels or limited mental health service delivery facilities. Targeted campaigns concerning mental health apps can be displayed in these regions.
Conclusion
Geofencing has a strong potential to improve patient healthcare outcomes and experiences. Geographical boundaries in healthcare delivery present great opportunities to render services matched to a given geographic location. With advancing technology, the application of healthcare geofencing will be even more innovative.