Dr Bernard Broermann has built up the Asklepios hospitals group and its US-based sister company Pacific Health Corporation since 1984
The €140 million building at Barmbeck opened in February
Future IT developments are displayed for patients, medics and visitors on three touch-screen monitors in a ‘showroom’ at the hospital
Asklepios develops an international showcase
Intel and Microsoft are developing pilot networks to link hospitals and healthcare participants.
This project involves just three hospitals worldwide: one in the USA, another in Shanghai, and one in Germany - where the Asklepios group of hospitals decided to take part when the former Barmbeck General Hospital, Hamburg, was privatised and construction of a new building began.
Asklepios predicts that, in the future, hospitals can only be run economically if activities are centralised around patients, beyond institutions and, to do this, the entire treatment process must be standardised. To this end, the following Information technology (IT) projects are to be set up at Barmbeck:
• radio frequency identification (RFID) to be used in treatments and logistics, e.g. in the Central Accident and Emergency Admissions Department, so that no patient could be ‘lost’
• dashboards to visualise the current status of patients, rooms and equipment, to avoid under-usage and enable precise and efficient planning, and to record which patient is treated where, when and by whom
• mobile ward-rounds - medical staff will be issued with tablet PCs to access patient data- and documents from the clinical information system at any time and place, with authentication and security controlled via smart cards
• The eHealth Interoperability Platform (eHIP) - a medical portal that enables doctors to communicate securely with the hospital and to use public interfaces with other medical service providers
• ECG telematics - mobile ECGs that enable the transmission of patient data from an ambulance before arrival and hospital admission.
Reorganisation of treatment processes - The hospital’s traditional ward-based system is to be replaced by a central organisation, which means that each patient is to be allocated a special treatment team.
Barmbeck is therefore set to become a global reference centre; if the new technologies and structures prove successful during daily use there, they will be adopted by a further 100 institutions (which include 72 hospitals) owned by the Asklepios Group.
This article was published on 05/01/2006