CASE Hospital X - A Smart Hospital Technological enablement, digitisation, and automation are affecting industries today in profound ways. Healthcare delivery is no exception. Hospital X, a hospital striving to provide intelligent care, applies the Internet of Things and AI-driven technology to provide effective care to its patients, and to address both its immediate needs (eg. cost control, efficiency optimisation, staff shortages) and its longer-term goals (eg. greater precision, fewer errors and better outcomes).

Being Patient Centric: Within the hospital, patients and the staff engaged in direct patient care use interactive equipment (e.g., wearables) to enable real-time data collection, tracking, and transmission. For example, patients are fitted with disposable patch worn on skin sensors. This enables hospital staff to monitor multiple patients in separate rooms simultaneously. The staff can access the patients information in real time via a mobile dashboard and a central viewing station. The information includes their blood pressure, heart and respiratory rate, skintemperature, and sweat rate. With cameras monitoring the patients at all times, the hospital staff will be promptly alerted if a change develops.

Being Proactive: Besides the technologies for monitoring patients status, Hospital X has also developed a game-changing solution with predictive algorithms that can, based on the camera and sensor data (a drop in blood pressure, for example), combined with information from a patients electronic medical record and aggregated data, determine what a particular patients medical trajectory is most likely to be, and recommend whether that patient should be given extra attention. AI cameras can spot potential deteriorations, hours before a human nurse or doctor could. And it can tell if a patient is likely to be readmitted in the future. As Dr Meilik, Hospital Xs Head of Health Quality Division pointed out No doctor, no matter how good he or she is, would be able to look at all this data and gain immediate insight.

Lightening the Workload: Hospital X is also currently trialling the use of robots to help fetch medicines, medical devices, carry documents and get them to where they are needed. It is estimated that these robots will eliminate over 1900 km of footwork for nurses and help make the nurses' jobs more efficient. Nurses can focus on more important tasks and let the robots take care of menial jobs. They are also used to disinfect patient rooms and operating suites at the least busy time of the day, to allow the task to be completed faster, hence reduces the usage of disinfectant.

Tracking and Tracing of Medication and Medical Equipment: An automated inventory management system is also a must to streamline Hospital Xs supply chain. It includes barcodes and RFID tags with unique identification codes for each inventory item to allow for accurate tracking and management. Nurses and doctors can scan the barcodes and tags with mobile scanners or devices and trust the data will be stored in the system. At the same time, automatic data capture ensures accurate reporting for charting and inventory purposes. The automated system also identifies products that have been recalled, or damaged, thus preventing such products or medications being given to patients. Additionally, automated inventory management helps determine the flow rates of drugs and devices that are used frequently and forecasts potential shortages. Inventory managers have access to the data and can set minimum inventory levels that will automatically place orders for items before there is a shortage. With such an automated inventory management system, the hospital can minimise its costs by adopting lean practices.

For each of the categories of value below, provide an example of how Hospital Xs use of Information System (IS), information technologies (IT), or operations management (OM) techniques, help generate value for itself or its customers. Limit each of your answer to 40 words.

1. Reduce Cycle Time

2. Reduce Costs

3. Increase Customer Satisfaction

For each example, provide:

1. a specific key performance indicator (KPI) to measure that value (limit your answer to 10 words); and

2. a benchmark, which Hospital X could compare the KPI against (limit your answer to 10 words).

Example of Reducing Cycle Time:

A KPI:

A Benchmark:

Example of Reducing Costs:

A KPI:

A Benchmark:

Example of Increasing Customer Satisfaction:

A KPI:

A Benchmark: