Optimizing Processes in the Hospital

 
Changing Conditions and Demands

German clinics are experiencing rapid and massive change. For one, clearly evident demographic developments are transforming the hospital sector into an ever more significant economic factor. For the other, hospitals must take a new compensation policy into account. Lump-sum prices for diagnosis-related groups (DRG) have been introduced with the aim of treating patients as quickly as possible, enabling them to leave the clinic at the earliest opportunity and convalesce as outpatients or at home. Due to be phased in over several years, the changeover to the new compensation policy is aggravating many clinics’ financial problems. What’s more, healthcare is evolving to become a service offering like any other, compelling clinics to compete for patients with other national and international providers.

Many clinics are unprepared to rise to the challenge of competition as an independent and profitable business enterprise. Experiences in the industry and service sectors have shown what it takes to gain the competitive advantages necessary to secure an organization’s continued existence. It must target and establish its position among the competition, change quickly, and ensure sustainable development.

Recognize the need for action; effect the necessary changes

Hard-pressed to capitalize on savings potentials and secure providers’ survival, healthcare is seeing a growing trend towards cooperation, concentration, and denationalization. And clinics are leveraging quality management and modern IT systems to improve internal processes.
 
However, examples from other industries have made it abundantly clear that these measures will not secure an enterprise’s existence over the medium-to-long-term. Instead, this requires an integrated approach addressing the entire service system, consistently and continually across all processes.
 
This approach is geared to significantly improve hospital operations in terms of time, costs, and quality without entailing major financial investments and technical effort. The goal is to boost individual processes’ value-add by reallocating available resources, realigning input factors, and persistently abolishing waste. Proven analysis and implementation methods help make the legacy system more available, secure, and profitable.

Designing the hospital of the future

Well-organized production systems have long been standard in industries such as the automotive line. In healthcare, and especially in hospital processes, they are the future.

We take it as given that a clinic may be organized in much the same way as an industrial concern. Health services are also commodities and thus obey economic laws. Therefore, as a performance-oriented service provider, the clinic should strive for the best organization, lean processes, and economic efficiency. However, these aims are harder to achieve in a healthcare clinic than in an industrial enterprise. After all, organizing medical services strictly with leanness, speed, and efficiency in mind could come at the cost of the human factor – the attention healthcare personnel devote to patients.

This calls for sound implementation approaches: We will work closely with you, leveraging the consulting experience gained in this and other industries to achieve the goal of securing your future and your jobs.

Andreas Bahr, Agamus Consult