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The Children's Hospital Westmead
Fujitsu Services Plus – Improving efficiency at the Children's Hospital Westmead
With a focus on excellence in clinical care, research, teaching and advocacy, the Children's Hospital at Westmead, Sydney (CHW) is constantly looking for ways to help sick children get better through the use of technology.
The hospital is a stand-alone facility dedicated to the health and welfare of children and is the principal paediatric teaching hospital in New South Wales. It treats 26,000 admissions and 580,000 outpatients a year, employing 2,100 full-time staff.
One of the hospital's primary goals in 2004 was to replace a legacy state patient administration system (HOSPAS) with a new patient management suite which integrated admissions, waitlists, scheduling and medical records. The project was unusual because the hospital wanted to ensure that the system delivered clinical and operational benefits. This meant it had to be simple and easy to operate, so that doctors, nurses and other clinical support staff could make full use of the system to provide optimum patient care. To ensure all benefits were realised, CHW engaged Fujitsu to review the implementation planning study, validate the initiatives and align them with expected outcomes. This enabled the hospital to monitor its progress throughout the implementation and stay on track during the upgrade.
"This project was challenging because it required CHW to rethink how it used its business processes and technology systems and what it wanted from them," said Peter Harrison, Consulting Director, Fujitsu Consulting. "Employing a benefits-based approach to improving operations was a smart move because it ensured the hospital achieved its targets and continued to gain benefits long after the system was deployed."
"The teamwork throughout the project was striking even under very tight time frames prior to and on the week we went live.
The collaboration across the hospital to achieve the benefits was impressive.”
– Dr Ralph Hanson, Director, Information Services, Children's Hospital Westmead
Helping the Children's Hospital Westmead on the path to health
To kick off the project, a workshop was organised with representatives from all parties impacted by the system. The group discussed the contributions of the new system to patient care, the targeted outcomes from implementing the system, the initiatives required to achieve these outcomes and the project risks.
The group also reviewed the potential impacts of an unrelated document-imaging project that was underway. "This enabled the hospital to coordinate resources and procedures and facilitate an improved design between systems," explained Ronan Herlihy, Patient Management Program Manager, CHW. "This increased the chances of success for both implementations."
Taking stock of concurrent projects also avoided duplication while consolidating training.
The output from the workshop was captured on a one-page map, known as a 'Results Chain', which showed the outcomes, the links between these outcomes and ways of achieving real benefits from the technology investment. A monitoring tool christened the Kids Electronic Medical Record IT (Kemrit) was developed to track the progress and relationships between projects.
CHW engaged business managers in implementation activities, which secured ownership of the system and strengthened the working relationship between departments.
"The teamwork throughout the project was striking even under very tight timeframes prior to and in the week we went live," said Dr Ralph Hanson, Director, Information Services, CHW, and one of the project's main sponsors. "The collaboration across the hospital to achieve the benefits was impressive."
By following Fujitsu's program and benefits management methodology, the hospital is well on the way to achieving increased bed utilisation and improved resource allocation, billing processes and patient safety. Best of all, the complication-free project realised its number one objective: to support clinicians in helping make their young patients better. The new system enables hospital staff to manage bed status through an online 'bed board' at ward level. Benchmarking was carried out to confirm the currency of patient information and declared as very acceptable by the bed manager.
"The admission process has improved with changes to the way we gather health fund details," said Cheryl Thomas, Manager, Patient Administration at CHW. "It has made admitting patients faster and we've had positive feedback from parents. There is now ready access to information at the workplace."
"The benefits realisation methodology showed CHW how to account for all projects and achieve agreed returns," said Peter Harrison.
