Public Sector Process Reengineering & Outsourced Managed Service

We transformed a public health provider’s ‘Patient Pathway’ that serves outpatients who are referred on to the hospital for specialist consultations by their general practitioner. 

We needed to transform the service and deploy a best-in-class service to better serve the community and deliver significantly better outcomes for patients. In order to achieve this, we reengineered the ‘Patient Pathway’ processes and digitised patient records, in order to treat significantly more patients within the existing resource constraints to the health provider.

The Client

One of the largest Acute hospitals in Ireland, the client serves a community of over 1.6 million people and treats over 400,000 patients on an annual basis. Operating within a regulated environment and held to rigorous and challenging performance standards, they strive to deliver safe, reliable, and repeatable services to the community and achieve great patient outcomes that represent value for money to the public purse.

The Challenge

The client was operating an array of legacy systems and processes, which resulted in over 20% of missed referral appointments where the patient ‘did not attend’. Each missed appointment meant not only a financial inefficiency - a monetary value of €120 per appointment - but also impacted on waiting lists, patient care, and the ability of the health provider to deliver health services to the community.

The Solution

We were engaged to address this challenge and to reengineer the Patient Pathway. This represented a significant cultural change for the hospital and it was a huge task to transform the service, with over 100,000 patient records needing to be reviewed. The transformation included data capture, validation and cleansing of all patient records whilst designing a new streamlined process. We understood that every piece of paper represented a person, and we restructured, built, digitised and delivered a patient management system that yielded 100% accuracy and significantly reduced inefficiencies in the process.

The Outcome

In transforming the service, we saved the health provider over €500,000 in lost appointments. That was achieved by reducing ‘did not attend appointments’ by over 50% within 12 months of the inception of the project, and we are proud to say that the service we deliver now results in 100% patient record accuracy. Perhaps most significantly, by our combined efforts, we enabled the client to treat an additional 3,000 patients a year making a considerable contribution to the quality of life of the patients and to the services that the client delivers to the community.