Navv Systems: Pioneering Real-Time Solutions for Enhanced Healthcare Coordination

Navv Systems, Inc. plans to extend its reach

Navv Systems, Inc., a spin-off of Henry Ford Health, is looking to expand the use of its indoor location-based platform, bringing high-resolution indoor maps and the Apple “Find My” experience to the workplace. This technology will help simplify management, coordinate teams, and reduce the loss of clinical equipment like IV pumps, wheelchairs and wound care devices.

The company currently uses its indoor position and mapping technology, NavvTrack®, to “visualize the use” of devices like phones and iPads. Up to 17% of mobile devices issued by health systems to their caregivers such as patient transporters, nurses and others, are misplaced or lost each year. It’s a problem that costs more than money. It impacts patient care and the patient experience by disrupting workflows.

In 2018 Navv Systems, Inc. founded with support from Henry Ford innovations (HFI), launched the NavvTrack® platform, an easy-to-use healthcare focused indoor location technology that helps clinicians, support teams and hospital leaders improve efficiency, utilization and patient care.

“We were inspired by Apple, whose products like AirTags are so effective in the consumer space, , with an eye toward bringing that user experience to the workplace, ” Navv Systems CEO Daniel Siegal, MD, said. “Using NavvTrack® more broadly within the clinical setting will lead to better equipment management and utilization, improved outcomes for patients and more efficiency for healthcare workers.”

Navv is currently expanding its application programming interface (API), which allows other apps and platforms to use its indoor maps and location information, enabling teams to innovate with indoor location tools that were previously unavailable.

“We’re excited to support expanded use of this technology,” said Dr. Siegal. “There’s such a need for healthcare teams to be able to better visualize and coordinate their people, devices and items. Historically, it has been too hard and too expensive to do this at scale. It will be transformative for both patients and providers to have these mapping and indoor location tools broadly available.”

Improving patient care and staff engagement

The idea around having a way to visualize where devices were being used and by whom – a concept later coined as Care Traffic Control - was born when Dr. Siegal, a radiologist and computer scientist by training, participated in the 2015 inaugural HFI Davidson Fellowship for Innovators in Health Care.

“In my experience as a radiologist, delays in care are most frequently not directly related to the exam itself – more often than not, issues arise in coordinating nonclinical things like transport, equipment cleaning and maintenance, staff scheduling, or other logistics,” he said.

Team communication and coordination is a challenge in every industry but has especially large consequences in healthcare. If hospital employees can’t communicate with each other and dispatchers cannot easily coordinate the work that needs to be done, timely care delivery may be jeopardized. Delayed support services tasks have a cascading effect; procedures may be pushed back, rooms might not get cleaned, and lab work could be postponed.

The NavvTrack® platform provides the tools necessary to improve team communication and reduces those delays. It was built by a team of healthcare experts with a mission to simplify healthcare with real-time location, all requiring little to no training for staff.

“The last thing healthcare workers want to do is learn another step in a process,” Dr. Siegal said. “It was important to us to make integration of the technology seamless for them.”

What they found was not only were workflows improved but the teams using devices with NavvTrack® experienced less stress in a job that is already fraught with it. For nursing, no more searching for a device at the beginning of their shift that was there yesterday but gone today. For transporters and housekeeping staff, a new feeling of control as their routes and routines became more predictable.

A bright future

With help from HFI, Navv Systems has been successful in the competitive start-up funding space, having most recently secured $5.5M in Series A financing in 2022, supporting further development and market expansion. Today, NavvTrack® is used in 21 different healthcare facilities in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and of course here in Michigan at Henry Ford Health.