Business Case: AZ Damiaan

AZ Damiaan in Ostend was formed in 1999 from the merger of the general hospitals H. Hart and Sint-Jozef. Until October 2012 it operated on two campuses; that month, AZ Damiaan brought all its activities together in its newly built hospital.

In this way, AZ Damiaan wants to compete with the very best hospitals in the country and is, more than ever, the reference centre for healthcare in the coastal region.

The challenge

To fulfil its mission – ‘to be the reference centre of regional healthcare for the coastal population' – AZ Damiaan needed to focus even more on quality care. One of the objectives was to obtain a quality label: the American Joint Commission International (JCI) develops quality standards for healthcare institutions.

To achieve the JCI accreditation standard, AZ Damiaan had to make all hospital-wide procedures centrally available to staff in a document management system. In practice, many problems were experienced:

• There was no central overview of all organisational procedures
• There were no uniform templates for creating procedures
• Staff did not know which version of a procedure to rely on
• Approval processes and revisions of procedures were not automated

Objectives

AZ Damiaan needed a central portal where employees could efficiently find the correct procedures – always the latest version – and where they could share internal news.

For the Quality department, it was important to be able to create procedures based on uniform templates derived from a mother procedure. The system also had to allow procedures to be published on a central page through an automatic approval process, with revisions happening automatically. All of these requirements are defined by the JCI accreditation standard for document management.

For the Communications department, it was important to have a portal in a uniform layout where employees could be informed about what was going on within the organisation. This portal had to become the starting point where employees could see the latest news, upcoming events or symposia, quick links to hospital-wide applications, the menu of the week, and more – with information that is “Google-like” searchable in a quick and convenient way.

Solution

SharePoint was chosen as the underlying collaboration platform and document management system. A quality management system was implemented so that all procedures could be created unambiguously through templates, with an approval process and automatic revision that meets the JCI accreditation standard. Via icons and adapted search mechanisms in the portal, staff can go directly to all procedures.

An intranet with a uniform layout was developed where you can create your own news articles, events and links. Information can also be grouped thematically via tiles – by department, but also by topic. Through the powerful search engine, information can be found and displayed in a fast, user-friendly way.

The situation today

AZ Damiaan now has a central portal where different templates can be used to initiate procedures based on a mother procedure. Thanks to these templates and the automatic approval and revision processes, employees can find the right procedure faster – and therefore spend more time on quality care.

On top of that, the state-of-the-art portal, with a completely redesigned layout, lets staff view news, events, a who's who and other useful information in a quick and user-friendly way. In short: there is now a modern, dynamic environment to easily find and share procedures and other information throughout the organisation.