How Intel is saving lives at Hadassah Hospital

A unique partnership between the chipmaker and the hospital had startling results for patient care...

About a decade ago, Dr. Yoram Weiss, head of anesthesia at Hadassah University Hospital, boarded a plane on his way to speak at a conference in the United States. Oren Riess, director of manufacturing and product engineering at Intel Israel, sat down in the seat in front of him. Riess noticed that Weiss was reading a medical textbook, and asked if he was a doctor. A conversation developed.

Weiss thought Hadassah had what to learn from business about management tools. "Hospitals are lacking everything that factories have to make things more efficient. So we decided to see if we could try to increase production, as it were, while maintaining quality and safety,” Dr. Weiss says.

Intel dedicated two full-time staff members to work with the hospital for a long-term partnership, looking at the system. They started by studying the hospital’s surgical recovery room, which was constantly behind schedule - a state of perpetual bottleneck.

"Awareness Effect"

First, the Intel people interviewed the medical staff. An early challenge was keeping track of such simple stats as whether a surgery started on time and how long it took to discharge a patient to an appropriate ward afterwards. Understanding the numbers, says Weiss, gives staff a concrete idea of how they're doing. “This is how it’s done in the business world: you put all the stakeholders around the table and you identify the problem,” says Weiss: “I felt it was a chance to bring things from the commercial environment into the medical world".

Just keeping track of the progress on various wards had a positive impact, said Liz Ghazi, Intel’s Healthcare Program Manager now working full time at Hadassah on the collaborative project. “We found out that once you measure things, without doing anything, you improve. It’s the Awareness Effect,” she said.

Awareness evidently leads to startling results. As of December 2012, the program had halved the percentage of patients waiting for space in a recovery room. Early discharge from wards participating in the program jumped 48 percent. Surgery cancellations dropped by 28 percent, and the number of operations increased by 5.4 percent. In other words, the hospital significantly increased capacity without adding staff. Other improvements followed, including the turn-around for imaging tests, which have long frustrated both doctors and patients. In the first five months of 2013, the imaging team lead a 50 percent reduction in CT cycle time and 30 percent reduction in ultrasound cycle time for hospitalized and emergency room patients. Intel’s involvement, Ghazi says, not only expedited the process, it also helped the department go paperless.

Worldwide, about a third of patients who contract central line-associated blood stream infections while in the hospital die from it. Thus far in 2013, a new quality assurance program reduced the number of CLABSI incidents in all of the 11 ICU units at both Ein Karem and Mt. Scopus Hadassah hospitals by a staggering 60 percent.

Meanwhile, in the operating room, the Intel-Hadassah collaboration more than doubled the on-time, first-of-the-day surgeries, meaning fewer cancellations at the end of the day. “The culture of Intel is changing how we work," explains Itsik Kara, head of the operating room’s nursing division. "Just by becoming a place where the first patient of the day is in the operating room on time at 7:40 A.M., it's as if we added one operating room, which would have cost us about 10 million shekels.”

But the point of the collaboration wasn't to save money or make the hospital more efficient for financial reasons, says Hospital Director Yuval Weiss – no relation to the aforementioned anesthesiologist. “The issue was always to be more productive for the patients, not for any financial gain. That’s a goal for patients' families as well: Part of the new partnership focuses on keeping loved ones better informed with SMS updates on when surgeries start and end and when patients are moved to new rooms. “We found that the SMS makes a big difference,” Kara says. “People feel like they’re much more in the loop.”

A romance with healthcare

One of the most important improvements is a new digital dashboard that informs the hospital what rooms are – or will be – available, something previously marked out on a whiteboard. “That one just went from purple to white, so now it’s free," says Kara, dressed in his surgery scrubs, as he points to one of the 23 operating rooms he oversees on the widescreen. “I think what we have here is a win-win situation,” says Yuval Weiss. “This way you can take advantage of the doctors you have, rather than just saying we need a larger staff.”

But what’s it in for Intel?

The Israeli partnership is something of a local experiment – nothing like this has been tried in the United States – but the company is looking to apply the model elsewhere. In Israel, they're exploring plans to bring it to two other major hospitals. At the moment, the financial burden isn't exactly evenly split. The love affair is largely a gift from Intel: They provide the two full-time staffers, while Hadassah pays only about $20,000, primarily for screens and computers. “The opportunity now is to try to duplicate it, to see not just how one hospital does it, but how all the hospitals do it, all the hospitals in Israel, in all the world,” says Riess. “It’s not a far-fetched vision. We have plans.”

For more than 100 years, Hadassah (www.hadassah-med.com) has been a leader in medicine and nursing in Israel, laying the foundation and setting the standards for the country's modern health care system. The majority of medical breakthroughs in Israel have taken place there. With more than 130 departments and clinics, Hadassah-Ein Kerem provides Israel's most advanced diagnostic and therapeutic services for the local and national population and a significant number of international patients.

iMER (www.imer.biz) is the international patients office of the Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem.  iMER, with offices in Cyprus, Austria, Germany, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Georgia, in cooperation with Hadassah, offers patients assessment services, the preparation of a medical plan and referral to the appropriate Hadassah units.

Source: http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/how-intel-is-saving-lives-at-hadassah-hospital.premium-1.531416