How a state-of-the-art hospital infrastructure puts healthcare first

Dirk Lambrechts, CEO of Europe Hospitals Group in Brussels explains how a new communications infrastructure across the hospital group provides medical professionals, administrative staff and patients with a BYOD policy, allowing the hospitals to integrate medical information, eliminating time and errors by automating processes such as pharmacy all the way to bedside delivery, and gives patients the same advanced capabilities they have at home, able to use their smartphones to see their status, or providing entertainment for dialysis patients using iPads

“The most important thing for me is that, at this moment we have full integration of the whole process of linking the medical file, including prescriptions, to the care given bedside. This for me, is the most important reason to invest in the network because all those steps required a lot of effort and created mistakes in the past , which are now removed,” Dirk Lambrechts, CEO of Europe Hospitals Group.

The first objective of any hospital is to give the very best patient care. Modern state-of-the-art medical equipment ensures fast and accurate diagnosis and optimal care for each patient and the Brussels Europe Hospitals group of private clinics offers some of the most cutting-edge technology available. It was the first in Brussels, for example, to acquire the Da Vinci robotic system HDSi for robot-assisted surgery. The group is made up of 716 in-patient beds across two acute care hospitals, and in 2011, took almost 21,000 admissions, with around 1,000 consultations completed each working day. It is the largest group of private clinics in Brussels, offering procedures across multiple disciplines with a dedicated multilingual department for international patients.

Providing care to people from overseas meant that it had to invest in the latest technology for all patients. Secondly, because of this influx of international patients, the hospital had to broaden its business in a commercial sense, as it began to change into a hotel-like setting.
“A patient coming in from abroad is more like a client than a patient in the way that he needs a lot of things to be taken care of. A lot of the staff were used to previously treating patients that get their healthcare for free, or nearly free, and this required a shift in focus as the patient became closer to a client,” comments Dirk Lambrechts.

So how does this affect IT? “In the past, IT was very directive. We could say 'yes' and 'no' if we wanted to, and we did only the things which suited us. Nowadays, we have to take into account the end users' wishes, and so our job has changed a lot. Saying 'no' isn't an option anymore.” With such a huge influx of patients throughout the year, it became clear that the Europe Hospitals needed to look carefully at its networking infrastructure.
In 2004 and 2005, Europe Hospitals was confronted with obsolete technology. In the voice space, they had a telephony solution which was not able to cope with today's demands. The Hospital also had problems of throughput and capacity on its LAN and WAN. At that point, they decided that they had to make a new start, so they started again from scratch.

Back to basics – with vision
“Doing this meant that we needed to develop a vision for what type of network infrastructure we wanted to build. Our network had to become the foundation of our core business.”

One of the main obstacles that Lambrechts and his team wanted to remove was the concept of the ‘device’. The ‘device’ shouldn't be important at all, and as Lambrechts says, “technology changes too quickly for this to stay the same for a long period of time.” As a visionary CEO, Lambrechts believed in BYOD.

The second idea was the team wanted to break down the differences between what consumers – their patients – could do at home with regards to technology, compared to what they could do in the hospital. Europe Hospitals was looking for an approach that was completely IP based and had an open infrastructure, enabling them to look ahead to the future and be prepared for any future changes.

“Open should mean open for everyone, not only open for some of those who are on board already.”

Making the network transparent
“Alcatel-Lucent had been our voice partner for years, and so we turned to them to help us define a network infrastructure which could answer all our needs. The added advantage here was that Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise had solutions for both voice and data, which we didn't find with other players in the market, which either had solutions for data, or voice, but no mix or integration. It was important for us to have one partner covering the whole spectrum.”

The full network infrastructure from Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise enables Europe Hospitals to provide a bedside electronic nursing system which runs on PC, mobile PC and tablets, as well as a transparent linking of hospital sites with the ability to see who's available, via whichever device.

As Lambrechts commented, a key way to save money in a short space of time within a hospital is by cutting the logistics process down – technology can do this and at the same time cut out the risk of human error and thereby improve patient care. His hospital group now take the patient ‘file’ to the bedside, so that no time is lost when giving a prescription by giving paper orders. Europe Hospitals wanted to computerise everything, and robotise those processes that could be. So they looked for a solution which made this possible.

“Imagine a doctor deciding at 11 o'clock that he wants to change the prescription. Before we had this infrastructure, it would have taken nurses up to four or five hours to learn of this change. Now they know it on the spot. And if they try to administer some of the old pills prescribed, the computer will tell them not to do it, and to change. This is a great feature of having a fully integrated network solution.”

Becoming future-proof
The main advantage of the Hospital Group's vision and the network infrastructure that they put in place, is that in the long run, removing the device-centric approach makes the Hospital future-proof. It means that for a lot of the staff and the patients at the hospitals, they can be assured that they are not dependent on the IT department to decide what they should or shouldn't do when they are working, or in the hospital.

“For the IT department itself, this change was initially a big cultural shock. From a very directive organisation that decided what to do or what not to do, we had to change effectively into a service department, being there for our internal and external customers. The good news is that the IT team now feels that they are part of the organisation and are no longer the 'geeks' hidden at the end of the corridor!”

“I foresee that in the near future, a mix of all kinds of services, applications or information sources will become more and more important. So once again, I think that not aiming for just one specific technology, but instead broadening the focus of what can be achieved, will be the key success factor of the IT department, and of the development of the sector as a whole,” concluded Lambrechts.