What Healthcare Leaders Want from RTLS:
A Look at Top Priorities and Challenges—and How to Address Them

A Chief Nursing Officer recently told me, “We’ve invested in RTLS before—but it feels fragmented. It isn’t deployed throughout the entire hospital, and it provides limited value to only one or two departments.” Another executive shared frustration about maintaining a siloed infrastructure that no longer meets expectations. 

Hospitals today face rising workplace violence concerns, mounting cost pressures, clinician burnout and the urgent need to modernize infrastructure—without disrupting care. The stakes are high. Staff safety is non-negotiable. Operational efficiency directly impacts margins. And outdated, siloed systems only add friction to already complex environments. 

At Midmark RTLS, we believe innovation starts by listening. We engage deeply with healthcare leaders to understand not just what they need today—but where they’re headed tomorrow. Our solutions evolve based on those insights, helping organizations move from fragmented point solutions to a scalable, enterprise-ready foundation for location intelligence.  

Many hospitals are operating with legacy infrastructure that wasn’t designed to scale enterprise wide. 

Pain Point: Fear of investing in technology that becomes obsolete or requires expensive rip-and-replace upgrades to expand. 

Healthcare systems need RTLS platforms that can grow—across units, across campuses and across evolving use cases—without rebuilding every time priorities shift. 

2. Cost-effective Precision

A major insight we consistently hear: “The technology we purchased supports only some of our goals.” 

Many early RTLS deployments were designed around a single use case or level of accuracy, which can limit the ability to support additional workflows over time. Leaders don’t want to overspend for sub-room precision everywhere if near-room visibility will suffice for asset tracking or broad safety coverage. At the same time, they cannot compromise when room-certain accuracy is required for nurse call automation, alarm suppression or sending patient location to the EMR. 

Pain Point: Historically, systems forced a tradeoff—either broad but imprecise, or highly accurate but prohibitively expensive. 

Workplace violence is increasing, and leaders are under pressure to ensure rapid response capabilities across their facilities. 

Pain Point: Existing duress systems are outdated, rigid or no longer fully supported. Some lack reporting visibility. Others can’t scale across the enterprise. 

Healthcare leaders want staff duress solutions that are reliable, configurable and future-proof—tools that protect caregivers’ time and safety, not systems that feel like surveillance. 

Many hospitals already have asset tracking technology in place—but access to that information is often limited to a single department, most commonly biomedical or clinical engineering. 

When location data stays siloed, frontline teams like nursing, environmental services and transport may still spend valuable time searching for equipment—even though the data exists within the organization. Healthcare leaders increasingly want asset visibility that's accurate enough for staff across departments to quickly locate the equipment they need. 

Pain Point: Asset tracking systems are often confined to biomed workflows, reinforcing siloed infrastructure and limiting the operational value of RTLS across the broader organization. 

Healthcare executives don’t want another standalone dashboard. They want RTLS that integrates with: 

 — Nurse call systems

— Epic and other EMR/EHR platforms

— Alarm management

— Patient flow tools

— CMMS and biomed systems 

RTLS becomes exponentially more valuable when integrated into the systems teams already use every day. 

6. Simplicity + Support