By Gretchen M. Stone
Patients in US hospitals face mobility hazards every day, as staff work to prevent pitfalls and keep everyone safe and healthy. Immobility-related harm, especially hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPIs), remains preventable but problematic nationwide at hospitals. Current HAPI rates can be significantly reduced by integrating a mobility-driven care model. This solution combines dedicated personnel, real-time monitoring technology, and data analytics to improve patient welfare and deliver measurable operational and financial benefits.
By The Numbers: Immobility Silent but Scary
Each year in the US, 2.5 million patients are treated in acute care for avoidable pressure injuries, and over 60,000 people die from complications related to immobility harm. Every day, this silent epidemic affects every type of hospital at a considerable human and financial cost. Worst of all, pressure injuries are largely preventable when protocols are followed, and patients are mobilized and repositioned safely and consistently.
Eric Race, CEO of Atlas Mobility, explains, “The core issue is that immobility lives in the blind spots of the health system. We track vitals, labs, medications, and infections, but we haven’t historically tracked mobility in the same objective, real-time way. Turning patients every two hours sounds simple on paper, but at the bedside, it competes with alarms, admissions, discharges, documentation, and staffing gaps. Without visibility and accountability, mobility becomes the first thing to slip when the unit is under pressure.”
Not only is patient handling competing with a multitude of other high-priority tasks, but it’s also physically demanding and can snowball into a bigger issue. “You end up with a perfect storm: overextended staff, high physical risk for caregivers, and patients who simply don’t get moved enough. That’s how a ‘nursing task’ quietly becomes a life-or-death variable”, says Race.
A Three-Layered Prevention Model
The Atlas Mobility model combines three essential components around two fundamentals: visibility creates prevention, and embedding it into daily operations makes it sustainable. The three integrated components are:
- Mobility Technicians
- Bedside Mobility Monitors
- Analytics and Reporting
At the bedside: Mobility technicians are dedicated, on-site specialists whose sole job is to move patients safely and consistently. They’re trained in safe patient handling, pressure injury prevention, and how to work in partnership with nursing as an extension of the care team. They take on the high-risk, high-effort mobility work so nurses can focus on clinical care while still knowing their patients are being turned and mobilized.
In the room: The bedside mobility monitor is a small device and sensor system that continuously tracks patient position and movement. It shares real-time data: Is this patient being turned as prescribed? How long have they been in the same position? Are we truly meeting mobility goals, or just assuming we are? This allows hospitals to now see immobility the way they see vital signs: as a live, trackable indicator instead of a retrospective root cause.
Across the system: All of the mobility data is then shared in dashboards and analytics for leadership to review and prioritize. Nurse leaders and quality teams can see turn compliance by unit, by shift, and by risk level. Executives can tie HAPI rates and staff injury trends directly to mobility performance. This data takes mobility from an anecdotal issue and turns it into an operational metric with trends, benchmarks, and accountability.
Race explains that combining these three elements gives you a “closed-loop system” that ensures the bedside team has help, the hospital has visibility, and high-risk patients get the consistent care they need.
Operational and Economic Impact
Protecting from HAPIs isn’t just about producing better patient outcomes; it also directly affects the financial success of healthcare organizations. One HAPI can cost up to $207,000, and across the nation, avoidable pressure injuries cost hospitals $26.6 billion each year. By implementing programs like Atlas Mobility that reduce these incidents, hospitals have seen pressure injuries reduce by up to 77 percent within 6–12 months. These benefits lower direct care costs, result in shorter hospital stays, fewer staff injuries, and improved benchmark scores for quality and reimbursement.
When hospitals reduce HAPIs, they see an impact in several areas:
- Direct cost avoidance from fewer severe wounds requiring surgical intervention, advanced dressings, or prolonged ICU stays.
- Reduced length of stay, especially for high-risk populations, which opens up bed capacity and improves throughput.
- Fewer staff injuries, because safe mobility practices and specialized teams reduce high-risk manual lifts and awkward repositioning.
- Better performance on quality measures, which matters more every year in a value-based reimbursement world
“The result is a clear business win that supports financial stability, workforce sustainability, and patient trust,” claims Race.
The Future of Mobility Care
Mobility treatment is now aligning more similarly with how infection prevention and sepsis bundles are treated. As it becomes a core pillar of hospital safety and performance, Atlas Mobility sees three significant shifts for the future. These shifts include mobility as a standard on every quality dashboard, care models designed to ensure safe movement across all hospitals, and technology that enhances human teams rather than replacing them.
“Our vision is simple: a world where no patient is harmed by immobility and no caregiver is injured helping someone move,” said Race. “If we can help hospitals hardwire that into everyday practice, we’ll have fundamentally changed what ‘good care’ means.”
