Business Intelligence Customer Testimonial Bonheiden

Imelda Hospital set up a hospital wide Quality Assurance Governance Program that required each department to control and measure their quality parameters. Although a quality assurance strategy and a theoretical way to get there was in place, what was needed was a set of quantifiable targets with measurable performance indicators attached. Agfa’s Business Intelligence Services filled this gap.

During a workshop with stakeholders, Agfa's Business Consultants gained agreement on the actual objectives as well as the parameters and Key Performance Indicators that should be looked at and analyzed.

Strategy:

Assure Quality to Patients - appointment planning

Objectives:

Optimize appointment scheduling
Improve Patient satisfaction

Main Key Performance Indicator (KPI) identified to support the objectives:

Patient waiting times

Agfa’s KPI Analyses:

Agfa's Business Consultants helped define the waiting times as being the difference between appointment time and actual exam time. As a result of mining and examining our scheduling database, they saw a daily trend from negative waiting times (i.e. the actual exam actually started before the appointment time) in the mornings to negative - or "real"- waiting times in the afternoons. Hence, waiting times actually grew during the day.

An analyses revealed that this actually was done by design: Since exams took mostly longer than expected, the admin staff started booking exams earlier in the morning so that they could reduce the actual waiting times in the afternoon. This was of course done to work around the real issue of exam times that took longer than managed in the system.

Agfa’s Advise to Action:

Correct the appointments planning problem by increasing the average time allowed for each exam.
Measure exams by type so that appointment scheduling is closer to the actual real exam times.

Summary:

This KPI exemplifies how a hospital could implement a seemingly easy step to increase patient satisfaction:

Measure exam times according to types
Adjust the planning system to the findings
Increase patient and staff satisfaction

None of these steps involved high costs or productivity losses and moved the appointment planning much closer to the real workflow at the hospital.