To provide safe and reliable medical services, it is important to have high economic efficiency in addition to high quality of care. However, the quality and economy of medical services are in a trade-off relationship. In other words, higher quality of medical treatment leads to lower economic efficiency by increasing the cost, and higher economic efficiency leads to lower quality of medical treatment by reducing the cost.
To solve the difficult problem of achieving both quality of medical care and economic efficiency, the SECOM IS Laboratory is engaged in research to quantitatively capture treatment outcomes and apply them to hospital management.
Post-operative infection (POI) is one of the events that we have focused on to evaluate both the quality and economics of medical care. After invasive surgery, infections can develop due to a decrease in the patient's strength. POI is a serious burden for the patient, but also for the hospital due to lost opportunities to treat other patients.
By visualizing POI cases, potential losses were identified and corrective measures were implemented. The quality and economics of medical treatment were evaluated by using hospital quality indicators obtained from the hospital information system. In addition, regular feedback of the hospital quality indicators led to the improvements.
