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A healthcare organisation had decided to invest in a modern information technology system for the nine elderly care homes in the area. The investment would standardise the interaction with all relevant stakeholders with the patients and deliver efficiencies in the patient experience and reduce the costs of nursing each patient. To leverage their investment in technology, they wanted to gain a better understanding of the current state of processes in all nine homes.
There are many separate professionals interacting daily with patients including GPs, pharmacists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists etc. Each had to be interviewed to understand their activity. A key challenge was developing a common/standard approach that was beneficial to all stakeholders.
Over a 12 month period the key individuals in each home were interviewed to get a qualitative research of the current operational issues affecting the staff of the homes. Subsequently Level 3 process maps were completed in each home to provide a visual on the patient journey from admission to discharge and complement the qualitative research.
Crucial to the success of the project, the Directors of Nursing (DON) and most of the nursing staff and allied services were supportive of a new way of working. The process maps and the interview outputs provided the material to design and present the future state processes to the company to deliver a consistent, efficient, and patient-friendly service. The output of the extensive work to create the future state processes were used in the specification for their new IT system.
The organisation now has a detailed current state map of the processes in each nursing homes involving all medical professionals who interact with patients in their nine care homes. They also had a future state map which eliminated the sizable waste from all nine homes. This facilitated the completion of a detailed specification of the IT system that will leverage the new efficient processes and save them significantly in the future.