St. Josef’s-Hospital in Wiesbaden is an innovative, acute care hospital for specialized care with over 500 beds. Sponsored by the St. Josef’s-Hospital Foundation, Wiesbaden, the hospital has 13 departments with a total of 1,300 employees who take care of 25,000 inpatients and 38,000 outpatients annually. The hospital’s motto, “simply be good”, is clearly visible in all the daily interactions between the people in the hospital and leads to a professional approach to patients, employees and partners.
Current situation and challenges
Until recently, St. Josef’s-Hospital Wiesbaden had, in addition to the admissions desk for the emergency ward, three admissions desks for elective patients, divided up according to departments. Due to the varying workloads of the different departments, this meant patients faced waiting times of up to two hours. This led to further delays, for example in the operating room, because patients were still waiting at the admissions desk. The hospital’s patient management set the following demands for any proposed solutions:
- Significant reduction in waiting times
- Creation of a central admissions desk for all elective patients
- Control of patient flows through a Patient Journey Management solution
- More flexible employee planning at the admissions desk
Solution
The hospital’s three admissions desks for elective patients were combined to create one central admissions area. This central area has three admissions desks for all departments. Patient flows are efficiently controlled through Qmatic’s Orchestra solution. At the Intro17 self-service-station, patients can select from various services such as “preliminary examination for a planned operation”, after which a queue number is printed out. In the central waiting area, the numbers are called up on two monitors that display the number on the ticket and a corresponding room number. The Orchestra system gives direct insights into the current waiting times and how many patients are waiting so that the number of employees in the admittance area can be adjusted according to demand.
Results
”Before the implementation we had internal discussions about whether this approach would make the patients feel as if they were only a number. In real life it was immediately clear: by applying the Qmatic solution and unifying the admittance desks everyone immediately sees the advantages of the new concept. We noticed a clear increase in both patient and employee satisfaction. Waiting times have been reduced by an average of around 50 per cent, which is in itself a very strong argument for this solution. The change has also had positive effects for the employees in the subsequent processes, for example in the operating room, since the patients now go there directly so that there is no space for waiting times,” explains Bianka Wienholz, Head of Patient Management at St.Josef’s-Hospital Wiesbaden.
