• Home
• GOVERNMENT CXO
• E-GOVERNMENT
• CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT
• TAX AND REVENUE MANAGEMENT
• GOVERNMENT PROCUREMENT
• GREEN GOVERNMENT
• GOVERNMENT DATA MANAGEMENT
• GOVERNMENT SECURITY
• GOVERNMENT CLOUD
• GOVERNMENT ANALYTICS
• GOVERNMENT GIS
• CONNECTED GOVERNMENT
• DIGITAL INCLUSION
• EDUCATION IT
• HEALTHCARE IT

Healthcare IT

Managing hospitals as integrated service providers

By Jianggan Li | 23 November 2010

Modern hospitals are becoming more complex, often managing and providing a variety of services, such as retail, security and even hospitality. A lot of these services are outsourced to third parties, allowing the hospitals to focus on their core competence, which is care provision.

“A hospital is one of the most complex facilities to build, operate and maintain,” says Grace Ho, Director, Business Development (Healthcare), Motorola Solutions Asia Pacific. “To ensure services performed by different parties are properly delivered to end users – be it clinicians or patients, you need to have close monitoring and clear oversight over these various aspects.”

In other words, hospital management needs to monitor and track not only physical assets, but also service delivery level as a whole. And what this entails, according to Stephen Lim, CEO of SQL View, is IT-enabled integrated service level management.

“The concept of having shared services is still relatively new in the healthcare sector, and what often happens is that different services are provided in silos,” Lim elaborates. “Hospitals’ response to non-clinical situations is often ad hoc and having an automated mechanism will substantially raise the bar of operational efficiency as well as patient and guest experience.”

SQL View specialises in records and facilities management. It has just established a partnership with Motorola to jointly develop mobile based facilities management solutions.

While an automated facilities management system could capture a lot of information, additional manual input is still required. “Information concerning crowd control or cleanliness of the corridor still cannot be gathered automatically,” Lim says, adding that enabling staff members from nurses to security guards to capture information allows relevant decision makers to have a much better view of the status of facilities and make decisions in a more accurate and anticipative manner.

An integrated approach would include not only the hospital, but also third party service providers to participate and make relevant decisions on a single, shared platform.

Ho notes that there are four pillars of integrated service management: integration with the rest of the hospital workflow, ability to actively anticipate and flag situations, executive dashboards that ensure situational visibility according to management hierarchy, as well as the recognition of shared services model, whether on premise or outsourced.

“A healthcare business ultimately is a service business, a people business,” says Lim. “While seeing more investors venturing into healthcare business, we have to acknowledge that the community within the hospital is not only seeking medical care, but an integrated experience.”

Lim also believes healthcare sector could learn from and benchmark against experience of other industries when it comes to services other than care provision. One example is building management. “Most general hospitals now come with cafeterias, tenanted medical clinics and retail shops,” he explains. “Shopping mall management sector’s experience on interfacing with tenants could be handy for hospital management.”

Similarly in the areas such as security, interior maintenance and energy sustainability, a lot of industry standards and best practices are available for hospitals to translate into their own context and adopt.

---