Healthcare

Industry

Historically healthcare providers originated from the grouping of healthcare practitioners with diverse backgrounds in order to enable improved service to their customers. These conglomerates resulted in healthcare institutes sharing facilities and resources, like nursing, beds, equipment and administration. Over time these institutes became facilitating organizations, hospitals, enabling physicians to offer their medical services, and became the official healthcare providers with negotiation authority to government and insurance companies.

Today the healthcare providers are encountering growing business challenges related to legal, financial and patient care issues. Financial resources are more and more governmental controlled, using standard billing amounts for standardized DRG’s (diagnosis-related groups) or - in Holland -  DBC’s (diagnose treatment combinations). Budget assignment, and subsequent budget control, is based on numbers of allocated (i.e. forecasted) DBC’s to certified  hospitals. On the other hand, customers are becoming aware of their commercial position and require fast and professional service.

Issues

Due to the increasing financial limitations and governmental control on one hand and increased customer expectations, there is a growing need for improving control and customer satisfaction. Integral planning is currently seen as one of the business requirements.

However not only from a ‘healthcare’ perspective, but also from a planning and control perspective, a hospital is an environment full of complex and tightly interrelated processes influenced by a huge number of parameters.  Due to the structure of a hospital, with different departments with different, sometimes even contradicting scopes, it proofs almost impossible to plan, prepare and act in such a way, that all activities that have to be performed, or all resources that are required, are available or performed at the right moment, at right place, at the right time.  

Solution

ICRON offers a set of flexible planning and scheduling tools to address these unique challenges so that Healthcare providers can improve their key performances by better utilizing the flexibilities that characterizes their business environment.

Integral Planning solution: Based on its distributed and collaborative planning capabilities, ICRON is able to create integral planning solutions that plan all interrelated activities and the resources inside the different departments, including staff availability, at the same time allowing for independency and self-control of these departments and its employees.

In combination with the communication between ICRON’s solution and the existing hospital and patient information systems, adhering to standards like HL7 and CCOW, ICRON delivers following support to the Hospital environment: