Authors:
Eduardo Cañada
1
;
Enrique Casado
1
and
Ana M. Bernardos
2
Affiliations:
1
Hospital Universitario Infanta Sofía, Spain
;
2
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Keyword(s):
Process Improvement, Traceability, Oncology Day Hospital, Information System.
Abstract:
Day hospitals (DH) are organizational structures that enable the supervision of patients who must go through
diagnosis methods or treatments taking several hours, but not requiring inpatient hospitalization. Oncology
Day Hospitals (ODH) are a particularly complex subset of DH, due to the variety and type of pathologies that
are treated in them, the characteristics of cytostatic drugs, the involvement of different hospital units and
professional profiles, the number of stages of the care procedure and the cost. In this paper, we describe the
design of a traceability and indicator system for ODH, which aims at improving the performance and quality
of service, providing three-folded benefits for patients, practitioners and hospital managers. The system is
currently being tested in a public hospital in the Autonomous Community of Madrid. Their users perceive
that they have access to a much more accurate fingerprint of everyday workflow, thus facilitating the design
of improvement actions.