Hugo Breda, Vice President EMEA, Medical Devices, Strategic Capabilities – Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies
The need to deliver more for less has become the accepted norm within the healthcare industry. As such, I believe the provision of value-based healthcare is an absolute necessity. But, when we talk about ‘value-based healthcare’, what does it mean from a tangibility standpoint?
I define value-based healthcare as putting patients – both their experience and outcomes – at the heart of decision making, whilst providing greater benefits for society. I continually challenge both my teams and myself to find ways of providing our clinical and non-clinical partners with more than the product-based solutions Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies (JJMDC) have developed for over 130 years. We need to help healthcare providers today find ways of addressing both their clinical and cost based issues. This could mean reducing the number of surgery-related complications, or reduce a patient’s length of stay in hospital.
It’s important to remember that every hospital is unique, facing its own set of challenges. So what does this mean in practice? It means working with each partner to identify and address their specific needs. It was with this mindset that last year JJMDC launched CareAdvantage, a holistic approach to co-creating solutions with our health provider partners. Only a year on, I am incredibly proud to say that we have already seen impressive results related to both improving quality of care and reducing costs for hospitals across Europe and beyond.
One example I am delighted to share is from the Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis (OLVG) Hospital in Amsterdam. Facing an urgent need to address the growing burden of hip fractures, the hospital wanted to create a multidisciplinary patient pathway to improve the outcomes and experience of patients, and also reduce their length of hospital stay from 9 to 7 days. To help them achieve this, our CareAdvantage team initiated a four-step approach:
- Working closely with the hospital and their multidisciplinary team, we carried out a comprehensive review known as ‘diagnostic healthcheck’
- We then mapped out the current patient pathway, identifying the biggest hurdles and allowing an ‘ideal’ pathway to be designed
- Using Lean management principles, we redesigned the patient journey to deliver value and results
- Finally, we introduced the Care4Today® Hip Fracture Program – a digitally-based patient pathway tool designed to accelerate the care of elderly patients through a multidisciplinary approach
As a result, OLVG met its target of reducing length of stay to an average of 7 days. Furthermore, patients and hospital staff were able to witness significant changes after just one year:
- Important reduction in costs for the hospital of €252,000 per year
- Increase in multidisciplinary meetings to provide optimal seamless patient care
- Simplified triage process due to reduction in transfers
- Geriatrician support for elderly patients increased from 44% to 92%
- Scheduled operating room slots to reduce pre-operative waiting time
I, of course, can only speak on behalf of myself and my JJMDC colleagues, but I truly believe the future of value-based healthcare is bright. The results of CareAdvantage have already shown what can be achieved through genuine partnerships, and I hope the success of the OLVG Hospital provides encouragement to other healthcare providers across EMEA.
Disclaimer: The results shown are situation and circumstance specific, Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices does not guarantee such results can be reproduced for any given customer.