Patient care, research and teaching
Erasmus MC is a university medical center in Rotterdam, affiliated with Erasmus University Rotterdam. In terms of revenue, the hospital is the largest of the seven university medical centres in the Netherlands. Core functions include patient care, research and teaching. Valorisation, the social or economic utilisation of knowledge obtained from research, is generally considered a fourth core task.
Many administrative operations as a challenge
However, the maintenance work performed and test reports critical to this service needed to be linked to, and shared with, each other through various systems and departments. This created an abundance of red tape for staff. Moreover, too much administrative work could also mean that things were occasionally forgotten or transferred from one system to another in an incorrect way. After all, manual operations, wherever work is done, always provide opportunities for error.
Connecting data sources
Meditain helps healthcare institutions and hospitals solve all kinds of process and technology issues and is a certified IFS Ultimo implementation partner. The question was very specific: if service partner Logic Medical, who does the maintenance, records the maintenance history, why not open up all this data directly into the IFS Ultimo asset management system through an API? The answer was a link between the two systems, created by Meditain.
Arjan van der Pas, Medical Technology Advisor at Erasmus MC, describes the value of the link as follows: 'The first word that comes to mind is reliability. In the past, PDFs were e-mailed, or our technician had to log into the database, download something and then manually link it. That meant a much more error-prone and lengthy process’.
Annual savings of up to 160 man hours
Nick Haak, functional management consultant at Erasmus MC, explains that the link between Logic Medical (Prodin) and Erasmus MC (IFS Ultimo) saves very many administrative hours annually. A calculation about the savings in man-hours was quickly made by him: “Over the year, about 2,000 ventilators require maintenance. Per device, we now save about 4 to 5 minutes in administrative actions, which means 130 to 160 man hours on an annual basis."
The future of IFS Ultimo and Meditain
"An important 'side benefit' of this project is that we basically developed a blueprint on how to achieve a functional design where integrations provide cost savings, efficiency and convenience. What applies to the maintenance of ventilators may also apply to the annual maintenance of hundreds of beds. So, we will undoubtedly develop more smart integrations between medical systems and IFS Ultimo," concludes Arjan van der Pas.
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