Environmental monitoring can be applied to a variety of industries. It’s not just about soil, air, and water quality and habitats; environmental monitoring technology can be used in facility management. It also has several beneficial use cases in healthcare. Here are some essential applications of environmental monitoring in healthcare:

What is Healthcare Environmental Monitoring?

Healthcare environmental monitoring has traditionally been limited to monitoring humidity, temperature, and air exchanges in operating rooms as well as any sterile processing departments.

However, as environmental monitoring technology has evolved, healthcare environmental monitoring has been expanded to include other areas across acute and ambulatory care settings.

With integrated systems, healthcare environmental monitoring can be extended into other areas of staff, visitor, and patient management and engagement to improve efficiencies, outcomes, and experiences overall.

7 Essential Applications of Environmental Monitoring in Healthcare

These are some other essential applications of environmental monitoring in healthcare that go beyond the standard:

1. Blood Transit and Storage

Pairing asset management and environmental monitoring technology provides the perfect solution for ensuring quality and stability during blood transit and storage. Not only can you maintain the optimal environment during transit, transfer, and storage, but you can also integrate inventory management for real-time inventory and asset management. This is particularly useful across large healthcare campuses with multiple buildings and within larger hospital networks across regions.

2. Organ Transport and Storage

Similarly to blood transit and storage, environmental monitoring solutions that integrate real-time asset tracking can improve the effectiveness, efficiencies, and outcomes when it comes to organic transport and storage.

In these situations, where the assets are delicate, rare, and essential, technology that can help you secure and protect them can increase the likelihood of better outcomes for everyone involved.

3. Medicine Inventory and Storage

One of the benefits of effective asset management in healthcare is the ability to manage inventory efficiently and accurately. Environmental monitoring solutions with real-time asset tracking can be integrated with highly capable security cameras to track, count, monitor, etc. inventory of medication, equipment, and other healthcare supplies.

You can even feed this data into your other systems to allow for even better facility management and even automatic reordering or alerts for reordering to ensure your facility never runs out of essential supplies. This is one of the automation ideas to consider for your hospital.

4. Room Temperature Monitoring

Automated temperature monitoring technology can be used to effectively monitor and stabilize temperatures across individual rooms in healthcare facilities. They can also assist with patient monitoring and visitor management with body temperature detection capabilities.

Not only does this assist your facility’s systems to maintain a more comfortable, stable, and safe environment across various rooms, but it can also assist staff in keeping patients safe and comfortable. This is important for patient rooms, storage rooms, and more, and is absolutely essential in operating rooms, quarantine units, intensive care units, etc.

5. Water Quality and Temperature Monitoring

Water quality and water temperature monitoring are important for every facility, and are even more essential in healthcare facilities, hospitals, and more. In addition to monitoring and alerts for the facility itself, like leaks, burst pipes, and more, environmental monitoring can also be used to regularly and automatically monitor the temperature and quality of water coming into and running throughout the facility to ensure it meets strict health and sanitary standards as well as safety regulations and standards.

6. Food Storage and Services

Any healthcare campuses or hospitals that have food services and serve patients meals can benefit from environmental monitoring applications. In addition to temperature monitoring and monitoring other quality standards for storage of both hot and cold foods and prep areas, environmental monitoring can also be used to improve inventory and asset tracking and reduce waste to increase overall efficiencies in this area.

7. Integration With Nurse Call Systems

Environmental monitoring solutions can also be integrated with nurse call systems and other patient protection systems in place. Nurse call systems improve patient safety and care by improving efficiencies overall.

By integrating environmental monitoring, your nurse call system’s capabilities only become more comprehensive and efficient. You can also integrate this technology into other systems to help provide an acute care engagement solution (ACES) that serves staff, patients, and visitors efficiently through every step of a patient’s stay.

Integrate Environmental Monitoring in Your Healthcare Facility With NEPPS

There are several environmental monitoring applications across industries and these are some essential environmental applications in healthcare. Integrating environmental monitoring technology effectively can help increase efficiencies across the board and also improve patient care, experience, and satisfaction. If you’re interested in environmental monitoring solutions for your healthcare facility, contact NEPPS at 1-800-736-1456.