ST. LOUIS – The St. Louis VA Medical Center, part of the John Cochran Division, will roll out a new real-time location system designed to improve management of growing patient populations and efficiency.

The medical center will deploy two versions of  Versus Technology's RTLS offering. VISion Clinic will be implemented in the facility’s outpatient eye clinic, while VISion Suite will be deployed in the medical center’s operating room to manage and automate patient tracking.

"The VAs throughout the U.S. are getting hit with budget cuts – even as they're seeing the number of patients increase," said Paul Timmerman, vice president of sales and marketing at Versus, based in Traverse City, Mich. "They're having to ask staff to do more with less. Versus makes that task a little easier and less stressful. Ultimately, the outcome is better patient care."

St. Louis VAMC officlals are looking to make IT processes more efficient and cost effective while at the same time maintaining a stable cost of care for patients. The new RTLS is expected to achieve this by providing services like displaying real-time location of patients, reducing manual data entry and providing key performance indicators like patient wait times.

The medical center also plans to leverage a feature that allows facilities to collect data on past patient visits, patient and staff interactions as well as patient-to-staff ratios.