ENGAGE at Haga Hospital in the Hague

Clinical pathways are an instrument to manage and optimize treatment processes for a group of patients. In a recent article for the magazine ‘Business Process Magazine’ Ms. Marijke Hugo explains how she uses the ENGAGE Process Suite to design and implement clinical pathways at one of the largest hospitals in the Netherlands, the Haga hospital in the Hague.

Ms Hugo explains: ‘Care pathways are a great way to optimize treatments that follow a standardized procedure. Especially complex treatments benefit from thestructure care pathways bring to the treatment process, making them much more effective and efficient'.

Clinical Pathways at Haga

For the development of clinical pathways, Ms. Hugo follows a standardized approach with nine steps. The first step is a meeting with representatives of all the key roles in a process. Often these are doctors and nurses, but also dieticians and psychologists. During this meeting the team defines the current process. 

Ms. Hugo then gathers as much data as she can about processing times, idle times and bottlenecks. She combines the information of the meeting and the data gathered to design a first draft of the present process in the ENGAGE ProcessSuite. This process is discussed with the team, already sparking the first discussions.In a third session, the team discusses areas of improvement. 

Using flip-overs, they define goals, flowcharts and bottlenecks, and discuss these with their colleagues.This discussion gives all the roles a clear view of the complete integrated treatment process.After this meeting Ms. Hugo often sees a change in the team. They understand the concept of process management and develop ideas to improve their clinical pathway.

Optimization

Using the ENGAGE Process Suite, the team defines a new optimized version of theclinical pathway. Thanks to the icons and interface of ENGAGE, the flowchart that the team designs is easy to understand by all the participants. In the last meeting, Ms. Hugo presents the full clinical pathway and a business casefor its implementation.

Results

The implementation of clinical pathways has contributed to achieving the goals Hagaset in 2006. For example, the time needed to treat a hip fracture has decreased from 12,5 days to 8 days. This results in less complications and benefits thepatient, leading to a decrease in costs and improvement of quality. 

Ms. Hugo emphasizes the need to discuss the new clinical pathways with team members. A hospital in Liverpool developed an excellent clinical pathway for Dying patients. Although this pathway is generic and could be used by a large variety of healthcare providers, the actual implementation is more complex. Only when team members take part in the development of ‘their’ clinical pathway, they gain the essential knowledge about the management of such process. At this stage Haga Hospital has implemented more than 100 clinical pathways and has seen major improvements on multiple levels. ENGAGE has proven to be an important tool for the design, analysis and communication of clinical pathways for the whole organization. Would you like to receive the full article? Please contact us