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INESC TEC develops platform to manage hospitals

INESC TEC develops platform to manage hospitals

INESC TEC’s Industrial Engineering and Management Unit (UGEI) has developed the HOBE platform (Benchmarking for Portuguese Hospitals) where the aim is to provide national hospitals with a tool to support their evaluation. With this tool it is possible to compare hospitals online. On 15 May, the platform was presented as part of a workshop that took place at the facilities of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP).

Currently, the platform focuses on hospital management, making it possible to establish comparisons between hospitals as a whole or on a more detailed level according to the different medical and surgical specialties. For that, the platform uses a vast set of indicators classified in terms of productivity, costs and quality. Other than the benchmarking, the HOBE platform also makes it possible to observe the performance of hospitals throughout time for each indicator. As a result, it is possible to develop methods to continuously improve quality of service.

The platform is being developed and tested with data from 2008 and 2009 provided by the central administration for healthcare (Administração Central do Sistema de Saúde, ACSS). After this first stage of developing the platform, the goal is to establish partnerships with hospitals in order to start collecting better quality data and to review the specification benchmarking so as to ensure that data are robust and relevant.

The HOBE is financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and it is the result of a partnership between the UCP (the coordinating entity) and INESC TEC. The project kicked off in March 2011 and has a duration of three years.

Partner institutions involved: FEUP and INESC Porto.