A new level of knowledge management for a giant health care provider
A new level of knowledge management for a giant health care provider. Puts in place a consistent, enterprise-wide approach to developing and sharing protocol documentation, even across remote sites. Saving time. Saving money. Optimising expertise.
The client:
Barwon Health is Victoria’s largest regional health care provider, operating the public hospitals and health care services in Geelong and the surrounding regions – a total of 1,000+ beds and 19 sites.
The idea:
Barwon Health imagined a system that enables hospital protocol documents to be shared and adapted across multiple hospitals.
The trigger:
Each hospital is required to maintain a library of protocols that describe the hospital-approved procedures and guidelines concerning medical treatment, nursing standards and drug use. Previously, each hospital maintained individual libraries, working independently and without collaboration to develop their own set of protocols – this time-costly activity duplicated development processes and provided inconsistent results. Barwon Health knew there was scope for improvement.
The journey:
DDG worked in conjunction with Barwon Health’s specialist staff to fully grasp the business processes and tasks connected to drafting, developing, publishing and sharing of hospital protocols.
While on the surface the overall objectives of the project are straightforward, delivering a successful solution involves digging deep into the current processes and operating environment to understand all the forces and factors that impact on protocol documents. The first step was to scope out the project and involved finding answers to questions such as:
- What do protocol documents look like? What content do they contain?
- How do staff use these documents on a daily basis? What are there expectations, and what problems
- do they currently experience accessing this information?
- Who creates these documents? Do the authors collaborate?
- Where do these documents fit within the organisational structure,? Are they departmental or hospitalwide?
- What management processes are needed to maintain the protocol library? Is there a need to audit
- changes, put in place procedures to review content, communicate content changes, etc?
- What security constraints need to be built into system? Who can access documentation? Are there
- types of documentation that have more restricted access than others? Who administrates security?
- What regulatory requirements may be imposed on the system?
To answer these questions, information was gathered from various Barwon Health staff, including several heads of departments spanning multi organisations. Contributors were specifically chosen to offer unique and diverse perspectives.
The discussions raised more questions and issues, helping to form a complete picture of the project vision, current issues and priorities for consideration.
The next step was to consider the highly-regulated hospital operational environment where compliance with security and standards provisions was paramount. The project scope required a solution to span operational boundaries, be easily applied to an organisation of any size, and demand a minimal operating environment.
The solution:
PROMPT is the online application solution designed and developed by DDG to provide Barwon Health with the functionality they imagined (plus some). PROMPT provides a common infrastructure which any hospital can use to build, store and publish their own libraries.
The major features of PROMPT are:
- The facility for protocol documents to be shared and adapted across multiple hospital sites
- An extensive search facility that functions across individual or multiple hospitals and departments to allow for rapid identification and access to target documents
- A sophisticated security engine providing fine-grained control over user access
- The ability to version content and track document authors and updaters
- Quality control tools to ensure documentation is regularly reviewed.
The benefits:
- Significant cost and time savings achieved via non-duplication of protocol development tasks, simple update of protocols to meet compliance or operational requirements and an auditable development pathway
- Production of higher quality protocols – document authors have access to readily review protocols approved and in use at other hospitals, and target those with specific areas of expertise
- Efficient information management – puts a centralised knowledge base of reliable and consistent protocols at easy access to all authorised staff; provides secure cataloguing and storage of documents/information within a convenient and accessible bank
- A consistent, enterprise-wide approach to protocol development across multiple remote sites
- Utilises low-cost web-based communication to share knowledge across sites.
The results so far:
PROMPT has been successfully trialled in the Intensive Care Unit in Geelong Hospital, and across several other smaller hospitals in the Barwon region. Currently there are 1000 protocol documents under management in the system.
Following a review process, Barwon Health has formally adopted PROMPT and so the rollout continues across other areas of the hospitals.
|
|
| 7/31/2008 | | The Blues Train | |
more...
|
| | 7/29/2008 | | Driving the Penfold Experience on-line | |
more...
|
| | 7/24/2008 | | A sizzling identity for a new sustainable meat brand | |
more...
|
|
|