Malaysia has seen an alarming
increase in chronic diseases that are related to our changing dietary habits
and sedentary lifestyles, putting high pressure on Malaysia’s future healthcare
system to provide fast, affordable and convenient access to safe and effective
treatment. Healthcare providers need to look at the healthcare process as a
whole to ensure that the healthcare system functions in a coherent and
integrated way. Providers want to maximise the number of patients whom the can
treat at ‘acceptable’ standards of quality at ‘minimum’ cost per case, where the
care chain (patient flow) and supply chain (goods flow) is critical.
Best-in-class hospitals have embraced healthcare logistics in developing a
patient focus, centralised diagnostics and simplified healthcare processes;
dramatically improving its overall performance.
Logistics is foremost a tool to
control flows, both patient flows and goods flows.
The goal of healthcare logistics is
optimal organisation and planning & control of healthcare processes for the
patient (customer) at the right time & location, patient friendly, within
the preferred lead-time, against lowest cost & capacity.
80% of healthcare and emergency
management has a geographical relevance. The use of geographic information
systems provides great potential in optimising emergency management for capacity
utilisation of healthcare network and response of ambulances and during crisis such
as outbreaks, disasters, and closedown of hospitals.
In hospitals, healthcare logistics
can add value in improving the patient flows through strengthening diagnostics,
reducing waiting time for doctor, reducing waiting time for discharge, and
ensure availability of medical records. Clear and efficient healthcare
processes with clear responsibilities and as little process steps as possible,
is a logistics goal that contributes to a safer healthcare system.
Healthcare processes need to be seen
as a process where the patient goes through. An example: after a heart
operation the patient is held at intensive care unit before moving to the
nursing wards. However the beds at the
intensive care unit are more expensive than the nursing wards. If the planning of
the operation is not aligned with the availability of beds in the nursing
wards, the patient will need to stay longer than necessary at the intensive
care unit, leading to higher costs. Another example is that patients after an
operation are waiting for availability at a nursing home or home care, where no
bed is available, and therefore need to stay longer in the hospital. These
so-called ‘wrong bed’ patients can easily add up to 10% of the beds in
hospitals.
Healthcare logistics also improves
goods flows through improving availability of medication, less delays in
transportation of prescribed medicines, and improving inventory management and
handling at units. In many hospitals products are ordered once the inventory
level is below a certain pre-determined inventory level in a unit. The starting
point in this systems is not the patient (end demand), but the inventory,
resulting in too high inventory and massive waste of products that have
expired. For operation theatres, also a push system has been practiced based on
the materials required for the planned operations. However, a new way to manage
inventory is to introduce a pull system, where the use of items trigger the
supply, from the central warehouse and supplier accordingly. This has been
operationalised through a Kanban system, an inventory system to achieve
just-in-time deliveries, hereby significantly reducing waste of medicines and
other consumables in hospitals.
With excellence in patient and goods
logistics you can deliver a better healthcare system at lower costs, which is a
rather unexplored area in Malaysia.
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