Success through agile product development: Reinbek Hospital and Berlin-based simplinic GmbH have jointly developed innovative patient transport software.
In a hospital, many patients are escorted from A to B every day: From the ward to an examination and back again. From the patient's room to the operating room and from the recovery room back to the ward. This work is done by patient transport staff. Delays affect many parties involved, such as the OR team waiting for the patient who has not yet arrived in anesthesia. This wastes time and human resources.
With simplinic.patient transport, the processes in the hospital are to be optimized, which also benefits the patients, as they have to wait less. The hospital Reinbek St. Adolf-Stift has involved all process participants in the product development from the beginning: Functional services, wards, transporters and IT provided feedback to the product team at simplinic in several development steps.
In the pilot phase, transports between radiology and two wards were tested in real operation. By the end of the year, all functional areas and all wards should be able to use the new software, which can be accessed by nurses via the normal hospital information system. will. Transporters have all received IPODs on which they can see and accept waiting orders while on the road.
The software has met with a high level of acceptance, particularly among carriers, partly because they were able to help develop the software. In the process, expert opinions were obtained, but also data from the use of prototypes was evaluated. "It became clear early on that it's not about optimizing the transport alone," says Steffen Geyer, founder of simplinic. "If the station doesn't know anything about a specific transport, the punctuality of the transporter is of no use at all." The step-by-step development was rewarded in practice by achieving an important goal: "The transport orders are stored in a pool in the system, the transporter assigns himself the next or most urgent order and confirms the order. This creates transparency for all departments involved," sums up Laila Wahle, clinic manager at Reinbek Hospital, "After less than six months of collaboration, the product is now running in live operation."
The result: Fast implementation and immediate benefits
The core of the simplinic products is a 3D spatial model of the hospital, which enables algorithmic process control. An HIS call facilitates transport ordering by the functional service. An innovative capacity management avoids the overloading of available transporters at peak times: Already at the time of ordering transports, users, e.g. the ward or the operating room, can see whether transporters are busy and when they will be available again. Wards are informed about all transports involving patients in their ward via a dashboard or are actively involved via a confirmation click. This eliminates the number of unnecessary trips made by transporters when, for example, the patient could not be prepared for transport. Cloud technology reduces the implementation effort of the clinic to a minimum and ensures continuous further development without administration effort for the local IT. In the coming months, the agreed collaboration envisages expanding algorithmic control with adaptive route optimization, establishing transports with multiple handover points, and making all live data available via dashboards for optimizing punctuality.
