Progress Healthcare, a local hospital in South Carolina, recently installed a nurse tracking system. This Real Time Locating System (RTLS) from Stanley Healthcare is an expansion of the commonly known Aeroscout, which is used for asset tracking. The goal is to understand workflow streams and utilize the data to streamline the workflows through a LEAN event. Data is captured from the employee badges and sent wirelessly to a local server and then sent to an online database for business intelligence analysis and reporting. Progress Healthcare also sends patient monitoring information to the floor monitoring server and then to the electronic medical record (EMR). The monitoring data is also stripped of personal health information (PHI) and sent to the same Internet server to correlate tracking information with each room. Understanding staff movement is seen by leadership and management as efficient. It is also a way to justify chargers and to validate the level of care a patient receives. Many of the staff nurses and assistants see it as a distraction and as another time consuming measure that diminishes patient care.

Write a 350 word summary in which you address the following:

Analyze the impact of using the Internet to communicate consumer information.

Assess the impact of organizational research and the use of IT to collect data.

Discuss the ethical implications of clinical efficiency research with monitoring and tracking data.