Three ways hospitals can become more efficient
By SAP
SAP experts break down the steps to build an intelligent healthcare enterprise in a three-part webinar series, running from 19 Aug to 3 Sep.
The Covid-19 pandemic shone a spotlight on hospitals. Large amounts of additional funding could be approved on short notice. “But this is not a sustainable solution,” Burger cautions. “Once the situation normalises, hospitals will have to check their finances.”
From keeping an eye on their bottom line to keeping up with new healthcare innovations, hospitals face numerous challenges. SAP is organising a three-part webinar series that discusses how institutions can optimise costs and improve patient outcomes. These weekly TechTalks will be held on Wednesdays, from 19 August to 3 September.
“Hospitals have to closely monitor their costs, understand exactly where costs occur and what options there are to reduce costs or optimise them, without compromising quality of care,” Burger notes. SAP experts will explore some ways that healthcare providers can analyse costs at a granular level — delving deep into cost per surgery or cost per diagnosis, for example. This allows hospitals to identify and eliminate “expensive, inefficient practices” and increase profitability.
Today, cutting-edge technology also presents healthcare professionals with a huge opportunity to improve the quality of patient care. Analytics solutions, for example, can now be beefed up with machine learning and AI.
“Traditional analytics solutions only look at historical data,” Burger explains. “It was assumed you have to always ask the same question.” Predictive analytics, however, allows doctors to answer the questions they do not yet know to ask. This gives them “much more insight into possible outcomes”.
SAP experts will share how hospitals can harness health analytics to make optimal choices for patients.
Delivering quality patient care also means delivering timely, efficient service. Currently, many hospitals’ systems — from inventories to clinician orders and pharmacies — operate in silos. This can lead to long waiting times when patients’ final bill is collated, as the costs they incur from each service has to be pulled from multiple systems.
SAP will explain how hospitals can adopt an integrated Electronic Medical Record system, to seamlessly merge front-facing patient care with billing and enterprise resource management processes.
Want to hear more from SAP how to set your institution on the path of value-based healthcare? Sign up for the SAP TechTalk Series on Healthcare today.
19 Aug: Integrated electronic medical record system for hospitals
26 Aug: Driving better healthcare outcomes through analytics
3 Sep: Gaining granular insights into healthcare costs and profitability