Reduktion der Befund-Turn-around-Time in der Klinik für Strahlendiagnostik - Prozessoptimierung nach der Six Sigma Methode
Die zunehmende Ökonomisierung des Gesundheitswesens erfordert von den wirtschaftlich und medizinisch Verantwortlichen neue Lösungskonzepte, um wirtschaftlich bestehen zu können und dabei weiterhin gleich hohe Qualität in der Patientenversorgung zu gewährleisten. Die Optimierung über Personalabbau...
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Format: | Doctoral Thesis |
Language: | German |
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Philipps-Universität Marburg
2012
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Online Access: | PDF Full Text |
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Finding new solutions for the challenge of cost- effective patient care without hazarding the high quality of medical standard, is the key to optimization of the German health system. Means like staff reduction, implementing purchasing pools or digitalization of radiology have been generally established in Medical Care Management. The next step to economization is optimization of the involved processes. One of the important benchmarks to compare the performance of radiologic departments is the “report turn-around time” (RTAT), the period of time between the x-r ay examination and the validation by the specialist, as together with the availability of prompt radiologic diagnostics it has direct influence on the average length of stay and thereby on the economic success of every single hospital. For the optimization of the RTAT we used the Six-Sigma-Method, well-known from process management in manufacturing industries, e.g. General Electric or Toyota. The core elements of Six- Sigma are to describe, measure, analyze, improve and control all kinds of processes using statistical methods. Furthermore it offers by its firmly structured approach to process analysis an excellent base for process-oriented management. By using Six-Sigma we were able to shorten the RTAT depending on the modality (CR, CT or MRT) and on the interesting specified time interval (4h, 8h, 12h) between 3% and 20%. The amount of long lead time reports (LLTR) (more than 24h RTAT) could be reduced from 9,2% to 3,9% of total reports. Now we are able to validate independently of weekdays or time of day 96,1% of total reports. The aim of eliminating every single LLTR was not achievable. 37% of the remaining process-conform LLTR were due to extended acquisition time, 57% to delayed validation. The amount of non-process-conform LLTR were reduced from 40% of total reports to 6%. As positive side-effect the implementation of Six-Sigma led to a general improvement of understanding of intern process management in our members of staff. Using the same human and technical resources process transparency combined with optimization and consequent error prevention makes significant higher performance possible.