Safety of clinical processes for patient nephrology care

Abstract

The function of health care is an activity on very vulnerable market. Necessity to maintain economic efficiency forces to looking for solutions, which could decrease cost-efficiency and minimize waste and inefficiency. Is it worth to use proven methods as lean management, which were used at the beginning of XX century. New methods were implemented firstly in manufacturing plants, at present time also works well in services industry. Lean hospitals is a philosophy, methods and tools which allows to keep patient satisfaction through the high level of quality services, minimizing waste using continuouns improvement of clinical processes. In order to improving the processes is essential to keep them safe, avoid any risk of mistakes and complications and avoid any resources wastes (as equipment, employees, finance and time). A lot of lean methodology elements could be used in nephrological patient care-dialysis centre as well as nephrology ward. Realization of clinical process using lean philosophy relies on establish hospitals medical team, information flow improvement, horizontal organization structure. It leads to fast reaction for present dangers and risk elimination at every step of process. Lean hospitals provides tools which assists implementation of new, quality management system standard for health care organizations EN 15224:2013. The purpose of standard is safety improvement in clinical processes and information safety.