hospital management - ETKHO Hospital Engineering

The Lean Healthcare method in healthcare management

In recent years, organisations in the global healthcare sector have opted to apply the tools of the Lean Management methodology with the aim of improving healthcare processes and the results of their daily operations, both in terms of health and in terms of optimising available resources and capacity by reducing and eliminating waste. In this post, we would like to explain what Lean Healthcare is, what its objectives and benefits are and how it is applied to the healthcare system.

The Lean method consists of the search for continuous improvement in processes in order to achieve the best quality while minimising costs, with the patient as the pivot from which everything else revolves.

The Scrum methodology in the hospital sector

The Scrum methodology ensures that the company focuses on what is most important at all times and as quickly as possible.

When launching a project, any organisation, in our case any healthcare centre, must ensure that the team involved knows its tasks and deadlines. Scrum is a framework that helps us to achieve this and, at the same time, speed up the delivery of value to the client.

Scrum, in practice, encourages teams to learn through experiences, to self-organise while tackling a problem, and to reflect on their victories and defeats in order to continuously improve.

5 Healthcare trends in 2022

Hospital engineering, electrical safety, the consumerization of health, mobility and telemedicine are some of the challenges that will mark the future of global health this year.

Like every beginning of the year, it is always interesting to analyse the trends that we will find in the health field. With our sights set on this 2022, at Ethko we have detected some of the main items or elements that will be decisive in hospital centers. From the outset, we cannot ignore the pandemic, which although it no longer causes the same havoc as in 2020 and early 2021, we do have to take into account that the transition from pandemic to endemic will take place.

There will be new treatments and vaccines on the market and in the sector to deal with Covid-19. In this regard, the reinforcement of primary care is a yes or yes that, however, produces more uncertainty than anything else. We already know that this virus has become persistent in thousands of people, something to keep in mind. European funds for health, the impact of mental health… The topics will be many and varied.

However, we can talk about the 5 main trends that will mark the path of health in 2022.

Current outlook of hospital energy cost and consumption

Improving efficiency in energy consumption in hospitals has many advantages and is a crucial aspect for the future of these health centers in the coming years.

The price of electricity is shooting up 25% in energy costs for hospitals. That is the reality that health centers are experiencing due to the global energy crisis, which is increasing the price of electricity to unapproachable limits for many people and companies.

According to the Spanish media Redacción Médica, hospital centers are going through very hard times and uncertainty due to the year-on-year increase in the price of electricity of 25 percent. According to Sedisa, 100,000 euros the monthly bill for electricity consumption of an average hospital. Hospitals spend more and more energy because they take on more and more activities, and also the VAT they pay and pay is 21%: there is no reduced price for these rates.

As they explain, part of the country’s health centers do not have the price of electricity closed. This causes that there is a real increase on what they pay in each invoice. Especially taking into account that the energy consumption of hospitals is around 3% of the country’s total.