HIPS

Hospitals’ daily operations heavily rely on processes that align patient streams with hospital resources (infrastructure, medical supplies, staff) and related information flows. But a hospital is a complex environment in which operations prove to be a great optimization target. One particular area for improvement includes hospitals’ supporting processes, which are meant to ensure that the right (and sufficient) resources end up timely at the right location.

Within this context, HIPS designed a methodology to effectively scope, list, model and evaluate supporting workflows. As a second step, that knowledge was used to design an innovative ‘to-be’ process supported by an open, scalable and standards-based platform that combines workflows with RFID technologies, and translating in supply chain savings of up to 30%.

“HIPS brought together a complementary group of industry partners who saw an important opportunity in offering operational optimization solutions for hospitals,” says Jan Van Ooteghem, HIPS’ scientific research lead.

H.Essers specializes in supply chain management; Amaron focuses on workflow automation and IT integration in healthcare; and Aucxis provides automation and IT integration solutions based on track-and-trace radio- frequency identification (RFID) technology.

“We took hip replacement surgery as a use case, since the underlying (medical) procedures have been standardized. That provided us with a head start to get a better grip on all related pre- and post-surgical processes. After all, that was a prerequisite in order to find correlations between those processes and introduce the methodologies and technologies to optimize supporting workflows – in line with a hospital’s KPIs and in function of its patients,” Ben Devis, HIPS’ project lead, adds.