Small Bluetooth tags in each consult room and on each patient's wristband, plus an app on the doctor's phone. The system records when each doctor walks in, which patient they are with, and when they leave. At the end of the shift the time report is already done and ready to reconcile against billing.
No badge to tap, no timer to start and no form to fill in. The doctor does their job and the timing looks after itself.
A matchbox sized Bluetooth tag is fixed to the wall or door frame. We set each one to cover its own room only, not the corridor or the room next door.
Issued at admission on a wristband or chart holder and linked to the patient identifier you already use. At discharge it goes back in the pool for the next patient.
The doctor logs in once. The app notices the room tag and the patient tag, opens a visit, and closes it when they leave. It keeps working in a pocket, in the background, with the screen off.
Here is a single consult as the system sees it. Every step is automatic and the doctor does nothing at all.
The phone notices the Cubicle 4 tag. Nothing is logged yet, because walking past a doorway should never count as a visit.
The doctor is clearly in the room, so the visit opens. The entry time is back-dated to when they actually stepped in, not when the system made up its mind.
The patient wristband in the room is locked to the visit. It is decided once, so a trolley wheeled past the door cannot swap the patient halfway through.
The exit is confirmed and dated to when they left. Turning their back to the tag or stepping to the doorway mid-consult does not end the visit early.
Doctor, room, patient, time in, time out and duration go to the server. If the Wi-Fi drops out in that corner of the department, the phone holds the record and sends it the moment it can.
Timesheets written after the fact are not dishonest, they are just human. Long consults get rounded up, quick ones get forgotten, and nobody can check either way. The same morning, two ways:
Illustrative example only. The point is not which column is bigger, it is that only one of them can be checked.
Pick a date or a date range, filter by doctor, and export to CSV or print to PDF for whoever handles billing. Anything that looks unusual is flagged for a quick human check before the report goes out.
| Doctor | Room | Patient | In | Out | Duration | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dr A. Nguyen | Cubicle 4 | 20418 | 09:14 | 09:31 | 17 min | Automatic |
| Dr A. Nguyen | Cubicle 7 | 20433 | 09:33 | 09:53 | 20 min | Automatic |
| Dr A. Nguyen | Resus 2 | 20441 | 10:05 | 11:12 | 1 h 07 min | Automatic |
| Dr S. Patel | Cubicle 1 | 20427 | 10:11 | 10:39 | 27 min | Review: ended manually |
| Dr S. Patel | Cubicle 3 | none | 10:44 | 10:45 | under 1 min | Review: short, no patient |
| Dr S. Patel | Cubicle 3 | 20450 | 10:52 | 11:21 | 28 min | Automatic |
Sample data. Visits are flagged when they were ended by hand, timed out, had no patient tag in the room, or were unusually short or long. Flag thresholds are yours to set.
Getting a record that stands up to a billing query is the hard part, and it is where most systems like this fall over. These are the things we get right so you don't have to think about them.
A doctor has to actually be in the room, and stay there, before a visit opens. Passing a doorway or standing in the corridor is never recorded as a consult.
A doctor can never be logged as seeing two patients at once. A new visit cannot begin until the previous one has closed.
If detection gets it wrong, the doctor can end a visit from the app. It is recorded as ended by hand so the reviewer can see exactly what was automatic and what wasn't.
Visits queue on the phone and upload when a connection returns. A patchy corner of the department never loses a record.
Every department is a different shape with different walls. We set the system up against your actual rooms during the pilot, and adjust it centrally afterwards without touching a single phone.
No badge to tap, no timer to start, no form at the end of the shift. The phone stays in a pocket and the record writes itself.
We also design and survey hospital wireless. If you want the Wi-Fi checked while we are on site, see our wireless surveys.
Time-based items claimed from evidence, not estimates. Consults that would have been forgotten get claimed, and queries can be answered with a timestamp.
Sessional, VMO and locum claims checked against actual time in consult rooms instead of against a roster. Reconciliation becomes a spot check.
Real consult durations by room, by shift and by doctor. Useful for staffing, rostering and understanding where time really goes on a busy night.
No end of shift paperwork and no chasing emails. Their own visit history is on their phone if they ever want to check it.
Staff acceptance matters as much as accuracy. The system is designed so it only knows what it needs to know to produce a time record.
Most departments start with the phone based setup because it needs no power or network in each room. If phones prove unreliable in your environment, the same reporting runs on fixed room gateways instead.
| Phone based | Room gateways | |
|---|---|---|
| In each room | One battery tag on the wall | A small powered receiver on the network |
| Doctor carries | Their phone with the app | A small tag on their lanyard |
| Doctor identity | App login | Tag assigned to the doctor |
| Phone off or left in a locker | Visits are not recorded | Still recorded |
| Installation effort | Low, stick-on tags | Higher, power and data to every room |
| Best for | Pilots and most departments | Where detection must not depend on phones |
The app currently runs on iPhone. If your doctors are mostly on Android, tell us and we will talk through the options.
We start small and prove it on your floor before anyone commits to a full rollout.
How your department works, which rooms matter, how time is claimed today and what the billing team needs to see in the report.
Wall construction and room layout both change how the tags behave, so we measure your floor rather than guessing, the same way we survey any wireless network.
Each tag is set to cover its own room and fixed in place. Rooms, tags and doctor logins are configured in the admin portal.
The system runs alongside your existing process. Recorded visits are compared against a manual log so you can see the accuracy for yourself.
We use what the pilot recorded to fine-tune the system for your specific walls and doorways, so the full rollout starts from a known-good setup.
Remaining rooms tagged, staff briefed, patient tag process built into admission. Support continues after go live.
No, and deliberately so. It produces a clean, checkable record of who saw which patient, where, and for how long. That record feeds whatever billing or claiming process you already use, as a CSV export or printed report.
Log in once, allow location access when the phone asks, and keep the phone on them. There is one button for ending a visit by hand if the system ever gets it wrong. That is it.
No. It only reacts to the tags in consult rooms and optional corridor tags. It does not use GPS, it has no idea where a doctor is anywhere else, and corridor time is never treated as a visit.
It works at room level, not to the centimetre, and both ends of a visit are dated to when the doctor actually moved rather than when the system caught up. The pilot compares it against a manual log so you see real accuracy on your own floor before committing to anything.
A doctor standing half in and half out of two rooms is the hardest case for any system like this. The record will not flicker between the two, and careful tag placement during the site walk handles the rest. It is one of the reasons we insist on setting up on site rather than shipping you a box.
The tags are ordinary low power Bluetooth tags, turned down well below their factory setting so each only covers its own room. As with any new device in a clinical area, we work through your biomedical engineering or equipment approval process before installing.
No. The tags work with no network at all. The phone uploads visits over whatever connection it has and holds them until it gets one, so weak spots only delay the upload, they never lose the record.
On servers in Australia that we run, or on a server inside your own network if your policies require it. Access is by individual login, with separate doctor and administrator roles.
It depends on the number of rooms, clinicians and the deployment option. The pilot is quoted as a fixed price after the scoping conversation, so you know the number before anything is installed.
Tell us a little about your department. We will come back to arrange a short call, then a fixed price for a two room pilot.
No patient information please. Just a picture of the department.