THE FIFTH CONFERENCE HEALTH - Belgian perspectives on how to improve healthcare
Smartsourcing in Healthcare
ISS is innovating with a more integrated approach to managing hospitals’ non-medical processes
Healthcare systems across Europe are striving to control costs and adapt to the impact of ageing populations, while simultaneously being asked to become more patient-centric. This creates a very specific set of challenges for managing a hospital’s logistical and support processes. At a time when non-core processes such as cleaning, catering, waste management, patient transport and linen need to be managed much more efficiently they have concurrently become a lot more complex to manage. For one, they have become a lot more frequent, with shorter rotation times, as hospital stays shorten. Furthermore, hospitals cannot simply adopt ‘lean’ management techniques that are common in industrial settings, because they are dealing with people—people who are demanding a more patientcentric approach. In response to these challenges, ISS, a leading supplier of outsourcing services to hospitals and residential care institutions, is adopting a more integrated and intelligent ‘smartsourcing’ approach to managing a hospital’s logistical and support services. We spoke to Rudy Mattheus, General Manager at ISS Healthcare.
An outsourcing company
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ISS is an outsourcing company. In Belgium, the company has five main activities. The oldest unit is the cleaning division, active in all types of cleaning services, from route based cleaning (whereby cleaning teams travel from customer site to customer site) to on-site cleaning (where teams have a permanent presence at the customer’s site). The other activities include catering (mainly on-site catering, for example, at hospitals), industrial services (maintenance activities), and support services such as reception and postal room services. Finally, ISS offers integrated facility services which are basically an integrated package of the above mentioned services. In sum, ISS offers an extensive range of outsourcing service for their customers’ non-core activities. In origin a Danish company, ISS today is active in more than 50 countries and employs more than 12,000 people in Belgium alone. In the healthcare sector ISS has historically focused on two core areas: cleaning and catering. The company cleans hospitals, from the cleaning of reception areas to more specialized cleaning services such as those for operating theatres. It manages the catering operations in hospitals; catering for staff, for visitors and for patients. In recent years ISS’s services have become increasingly diverse and specialized. For example, it also offers specialized cleaning services for environments that have strict or highly specific hygiene criteria such as kitchen environments or air ducts. These are very important in hospitals to reduce the risk of infection.
Towards Smartsourcing Given its range of outsourcing services, ISS increasingly is asked by its customers to take care of the full suite of non-core processes. For a number of hospitals in Singapore, for example, ISS takes responsibility for practically every process that is non-medical in nature, from reception and logistics to patient bathing (non-intensive care patients) and even ambulance services. For ISS this is not simply an opportunity to do more, it is an opportunity to do things differently and more intelligently. Rudy Mattheus explains; “we are gradually moving from an outsourcing model to a smartsourcing model. With outsourcing one is basically doing the same activities as in the past, typically with the same people, but on our payroll. With smartsourcing we are positioning ourselves as a partner with joint responsibility for the end result. Under this model it is not the number and timing of cleaning sessions that count. On the contrary, what gets measured and contractually defined via SLAs (service level agreements) is the cleanliness of the area in question.”
Enabling innovation Smartsourcing is ‘smart’ in the sense that one is exploiting synergistic opportunities by integrating several distinct processes that used to be managed in isolation from each other. By combining the know-how about a number of different processes one is able to design a more efficient and effective ‘hotel service’. And by focusing on the results as opposed to the means one is allowing for a degree of innovation in the way those results are achieved. In the smartsourcing model ISS has every incentive to introduce new tools and methods to achieve its target more effectively. Everything is reevaluated with those goals in mind, from the organization of work processes to the design of the cleaning trolley.
Empowering people Ultimately, however, the effectiveness of support services in a hospital environment depends on people. Contrary to predictable industrial environments, one cannot standardize everything in a hospital—there will always be unexpected events and most importantly, one is dealing with people, not goods. Hence, the way ISS approaches smartsourcing is by empowering its people. To illustrate, in most hospitals there are different people and departments responsible for making patient beds, cleaning patient rooms, serving meals, etc. In an integrated concept you bring these processes together under the responsibility of a single person: one person who is responsible for a specific