Success Story - Kantonsspital Baden

Kantonsspital Baden Hospital Optimises OR Resource Planning with Qlik

Transparency across staff and room resources for the annual coordination of about 15,000 operative procedures

“As an OR manager, my task is to ensure a process-optimised, economical process during an operation and to simultaneously make sure that the medical staff is not overstrained and that the patients receive optimal care. For me, Qlik is an essential instrument to keep an overview of all resources at all time.”

Dr Janine Härtli, Head Physician of Anaesthesia and OR Manager, Kantonsspital Baden Hospital

The client

The Kantonsspital Baden (KSB) hospital is both a primary care provider and a specialist provider. For more than 350,000 inhabitants in the eastern part of the canton of Aargau, KSB offers safe health care close to their homes. In addition, specialists from various disciplines work closely together in various interdisciplinary centres. Roughly 20,700 patients were treated as inpatients at the KSB in 2019; the number of outpatient consultations in the same year was around 244,300. KSB has 2,524 employees, making it one of the largest employers in the region. Find out more at www.kantonsspitalbaden.ch

Solutions overview

Branche: Healthcare
Departments: OR operation
Region: Canton of Aargau (Switzerland)
Partner: Informatec
Used technology: Qlik Sense
ROI & Time-to-Value: Greater transparency regarding data relevant to OR management

Starting situation

The challenge of resource-efficient patient care

Rising patient numbers, continuous cost pressure and a heavy workload are the main challenges facing the Swiss healthcare system. Hospitals like KSB have to find solutions that ensure high-quality and equally resource-efficient care for their patients. The goal is thus to provide patients with the best-possible care, while at the same time making moderate use of staff as service providers and essential resources as well as available rooms.

Coordination of 11,500 operations per year

To this end, the Kantonsspital hospital did not want to rely on estimates, but wanted to know exactly what the staff and rooms utilisation is in the OR operations - a very cost- and resource-intensive area of the hospital. It is all the more vital to properly plan important resources.

“So far, only some of the data from our OR management system could be evaluated,” reports Dr Janine Härtli, Head Physician of Anaesthesiology and OR Manager at the Baden Hospital. “However, our goal was to know, at all times, exactly what our status is, what we can achieve and where the limit of feasibility is reached. For we also want to prevent an overstraining of the staff in the interest of the patients.” The OR manager and her team coordinate around 11,500 surgical procedures every year. Eight operating theatres are available at KSB in the main operating room for surgeries (one of them around the clock), and two more during the day in the outpatient operating centre. The ninth room is reserved for Caesarean sections.

Based on data from the ISMed-eOPPS OR management system, KSB would like to display and analyse the overall time spent by all the surgical, anaesthesiological and OR nursing staff involved in the surgeries, as well as the capacity utilisation of the operating and recovery rooms.

Solution

Qlik is the technology of choice

The analysis and reporting solution Qlik was to be used as the BI platform. It had already been successfully implemented at KSB by KSB ICT and is used for evaluations in areas such as radiology, laboratory, materials management, pharmacy and clinical issues as well as for evaluations in the area of materials management. The required source data comes from the OR management system ISMed-eOPPS, to which Qlik is directly connected via an interface.
As the IT partner for the implementation of the OR project, especially the development of applications, the hospital enlisted the help of Informatec, an IT service provider specialised in data intelligence.

Informatec impresses with OR operation expertise

“It was very important to me to work with an IT service provider that has a certain amount of experience in the healthcare sector, but above all has expertise in technology and data intelligence,” recalls Dr Janine Härtli. “However, the fact that we have a consultant at our side who is so well versed in OR processes and OR management was a positive surprise. They immediately understood what we wanted and translated our requirements into applications. I really appreciated the great competence and cooperative collaboration.”
Informatec has accumulated competence in the healthcare sector through numerous projects. Among others, the IT service provider implemented data intelligence solutions for the University Hospital Basel, the Monvia Health Centre and the Psychiatric Services Aargau.

Qlik Sense

FREEDOM FOR INTUITIONS

Qlik Sense is a revolutionary application that allows anyone to create self-service data visualization, personalized reports and dynamic dashboards.

TO QLIK SENSE

Application areas and usage

OP-Management KPI via Qlik dashboards

Various Qlik dashboards are used at Baden Hospital, which are provided data from ISMed-eOPPS via a direct interface. Mapped and categorisable according to the type of surgery - some visceral, thoracic or general surgery - information on the time and personnel expended for the operative pre-surgery, operative post-surgery and anaesthesia drainage as well as the utilisation of the ORs or the recovery room is displayed. Typical key figures in this context also cover the duration of the anaesthesia induction and the time needed to prepare the operating table. Further examples include the waiting time for the patient and the surgeon, respectively, and the cut-suture time for the duration of the operation. The suture-cut and change time can additionally be retrieved, which defines the average time between the end of post-operative measures and the release of the anaesthesia for the following patient, as well as the wake-up time until the patient can be transferred to the ward. In addition, the OR utilisation in the form of the number of minutes of incision and suture time after operations during core hours is also displayed as well as the total number of operations according to criteria such as type of surgery, duration, day, week, etc.

Greater transparency, better resource planning

By using Qlik, the KSB gains more detailed insight into the figures from ISMed eOPPS that are relevant for OR management. The hospital can very swiftly and directly acquire information on the degree of capacity utilisation and the time required for each process step. “I can now exactly see, in a graphically visualised way, how much time we need in total for a major visceral operation - from the preparation to the transfer of the patient to the ward,” says Dr Janine Härtli. Detailed information on individual process steps is also available, adds the OR manager: “At the push of a button, for example, I can call up at which times the recovery room is most heavily used and how much time is spent in the recovery room depending on the operations, or on which days of the week there are particularly many operations. This allows us to better plan our resources.”
A great advantage for the head physician of the anaesthesia department is the option to see directly when capacity limits are reached. “We must be diligent to provide good care for our patients. This also means that we use our staff, as the most important service providers, to a healthy degree.”

Less benchmarking effort

In addition, by using Qlik, KSB benefits from reduced effort in providing data for monitoring the quality of anaesthesia in Switzerland as part of the A-QUA benchmarking programme. The program is an important part of the national, subject-specific quality programme in accordance with the legal basis for quality assurance. Dr Janine Härtli estimates that they save roughly half a day.

The Future

In a further project step, the dashboards will be made available to other KSB employees. And with Qlik, KSB also sees itself well prepared for any new requirements placed on analyses: Because standardised time stamps from the OR management system are used, additional evaluation requirements can be implemented flexibly at any time.