Managing hospital logistics will be easier
As patients need to be constantly monitored by healthcare professionals, it is important to make sure that hospital management is also in good health. This is a complex activity considering that, in between predicting needs, managing stocks and human resources and allocating rooms and complementary means of diagnosis, amongst many other tasks, there are potential improvements that would allow healthcare providers to dedicate more time to their patients.
Fully aware of this enormous potential, Glintt, a Portuguese company working in the field of health information technologies, in collaboration with INESC TEC, promoted the development of Knowlogis, a solution that monitors hospital management, exploiting opportunities for improvement and facilitating the decision-making processes of hospital managers.
INESC TEC, through the Centre for Industrial Engineering and Management (CEGI), coordinated by Ana Viana and Pedro Amorim, gives its technological contribution to the project by integrating the best practices of operational research and operations management in hospital logistics, crossing data from information systems with the simulation and optimisation systems.
The result is an intelligent dashboard, called Knowlogis, that automatically analyses the hospital’s performance and budget implementation indicators. Furthermore, the Knowlogis also monitors the evolution of stocks and medications, analyses the evolution of historical data and the scheduling of procedures, and, based on the most advanced simulation and optimisation models, it proposes, in an active way, several improvements, such as stock management policies, capacity management, human resources allocation, among others. The hospital manager can then use this information for managing the hospital more efficiently. Fundamentally, the Knowlogis monitors the vital signs of hospital logistics and management.
According to the researcher Mário Amorim Lopes, who is responsible for the project’s technical component, this is a unique opportunity for the health sector to incorporate some of the best practices from other industries, which have made it possible to achieve great efficiency gains. For the researcher, these gains are all the resources that might be used more efficiently in a hospital environment, allowing more to treat a larger number of patients.
This project’s application to the Portugal2020 programme featured several institutions, mostly hospitals, from the public, public-private and private sectors, with the common goal of contributing to the improvement of healthcare in Portugal.
The pilot project will start in April 2017 and should run until the end of 2019.
The team working on this project is composed of Ana Viana, Gonçalo Figueira, Luís Guimarães, Mário Amorim Lopes and Pedro Amorim, all researchers at CEGI, and Cristina Guimarães from the INESC TEC’s Industry Partnership Service (SAPE).
The researchers mentioned in this article are associated with INESC TEC, P.Porto and UP-FEUP.
