IoT adoption is bringing unprecedented operational efficiency to the healthcare sector in managing day-to-day clinical operations, tracking hospitalized patients, and more. Technavios, in its Global Internet of Things Market in the Healthcare Sector 2016-2020 report, predicts that the the Global Internet of Things (IoT) market in healthcare is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 36.5% during the period 2016-2020. The healthcare sector itself is slated to reach a worth $117 million by 2020 according to MarketResearch.

Location based technologies like Wi-Fi, GPS, NFC, and beacons are fast gaining traction in healthcare. These can be harnessed for a host of functions like, keeping tabs on devices, assets and patients. iBeacon technology is among the most effective and efficient solutions that can be deployed in the healthcare space today for a wide variety of location based applications like customisation of health content, delivering electronic health records, providing indoor maps and navigation, automate internal operations and more.

In this post, we will discuss how you can easily gather analytics on visitors for your hospital using the Beaconstac Admin console.

Campaign Objective:

The objective of this campaign is to gather useful information on visitor behavior such as average footfall, average time spent in certain areas of the hospital and demographic breakdowns of hospital visitors, by using various beacon campaigns and Beaconstac Admin console.

Step 1: Add beacons to the dashboard

Before we begin, the first thing to do is to purchase beacons. Also take a look at our Beaconstac platform, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!

In the context of a hospital, you will need several beacons—both in shared spaces and in individual hospital departments —to interact with visitors in a meaningful way.

Once you have purchased the beacons, their details such as the UUID, major and minor numbers, will be added to the Beaconstac dashboard (by us) before we ship the beacons to you.

You can name the beacons for easy identification. In large scale deployments, it is especially important to name your beacons accurately. To demonstrate this campaign in a simple manner, let us start with six beacons, each placed at the entrance of a department in the hospital. The beacons are named after their locations: ‘Orthopaedics’, ‘Cardiology’,’Neurology’, ‘Gastroenterology’, ‘Haematology’, and ‘Gynaecology’.

Step 2: Track general visitor behavior using Overview section of Analytics

There are several beacon campaigns that you can implement in hospitals—from aggregating patients’ medical history to providing indoor navigation, for instance. In this post, we will primarily focus on the analytics side of beacon campaigns.

In the ‘Overview’ tab under the ‘Analytics’ section, you will get a general overview of the activity from your top departments in the hospital. As visible in the screenshot below, you can get an overview of data from all the six beacons installed at the entrance of the five departments.

You can change the “dimension” of the chart from:

a) ‘Camp On’ (which is the act of a visitor’s phone registering a beacon) to

b) ‘Rules’ (number of times rules were triggered by a beacon),

c) ‘Average time spent’ (average time spent by visitors in the proximity of a beacon) and,

d) ‘Total time spent’ (total time spent by visitors in the proximity of a beacon).

The default time period is a month. You can change this time period via the range selector in the top left of the screen.

These cumulative metrics provide a meaningful birds-eye view of patient activity in your hospital such as general traffic flow and relative visitor dwell times at various locations. This helps you decide where people are generally going and for how long, which can help to take future decisions regarding proximity marketing campaigns, budget allocation, staffing healthcare professionals, and more.

Step 3: Gather deeper visitor insights from Visitors section of Analytics

In the Visitors tab under Analytics, you can get more specific information about each visitor who interacts with your beacons. Here, you will have access to a list where you can see each visitor’s name (depending on the permissions your app has taken from the users to collect this information), last visited department location, last visit, total number of visits, Beaconstac SDK version and device profile.

Below the list, you will see a pie chart showing the proportion of new visitors and returning visitors in the selected time period. This is a simple yet powerful measurement for understanding the growth—or lack thereof—in your hospital visitorship.

When you click on the name of a visitor in the list of visitors, you will be taken to a detailed visitor analytics page that will give you a snapshot of that particular visitor: name, profile (based on custom attributes used in campaigns through the app), device ID, total visits and last visit.

You can also see a pie-chart showing the time that visitor spent in the proximity of certain beacons.

We also give you the details of the last ten visits made by a particular visitor to your hospital. The information includes specific beacons and the timestamp, so that you can easily track the path taken by the visitor throughout the hospital.

These detailed insights are incredibly powerful for hospital owners looking to gain a strategic edge. You can pinpoint common paths through your space, aggregate user information to develop data-driven personas, and even tailor sections of your hospital to serve different segments of visitors better.

The analytics features discussed above are only the beginning. Beacons give immense power to businesses via big data as they enable business heads to make drive business intelligence and mould their marketing strategies to yield results.

Try out the above beacon campaign and let me know your thoughts on it. If you have any questions with regards to this campaign or if there is a specific campaign you would like to read about, I’ll be more than happy to share how you set it up using Beaconstac.

If you are planning a beacon pilot, take a look at Beaconstac, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!