Within the project Hospital Engineering the research group is developing overall concepts for designing the hospital of future in the cooperation with 24 partners coming from academia and industry. It is an application-oriented project, which is aimed at medium-term implementation of research results. Dipl.-Wirt.-Inf. Michal Heß is representing the research group within the project team.

Motivation
German hospitals are facing conflicting goals because of changes in regulatory, economic and social constraints. On the one hand, the introduction of Dianosis Related Groups (DRG system) – and thereby the substitution of the established cost-recovery-principle – is now requiring from hospitals an economical and entrepreneurial behaviour. On the other hand however, the policy of health care system and the society itself are postulating – in the light of demographic changes and at the same time medical and technical progress – a continuous increase in quality of medical services with a simultaneous rise of supply with reduced expenses, if possible. Simultaneously, regulatory changes are demanding an increase in transparency of type, extent, quality and costs of provided medical services. Due to this there are increased efforts amongst others, when it comes to the appropriate administration and documentation of realized processes, which usually has to be done by medical staff, so that they are obliged to carry out more and more often additional administrative tasks. The use of advanced information technology (IT) is able to contribute to the provision of medical services with better quality and less costs and supporting medical staff in carrying administrative, e.g., documentary tasks allowing them to focus on the core of their responsibilities i.e., taking care of patients.

Goals 
Against the outlined background the project „Hospital Engineering – Innovationspfade für das Krankenhaus der Zukunft“aims at increasing competitiveness of hospitals through usage of advanced information technology and simultaneously supporting medical staff in performing administrative tasks. The project aims to support primary, secondary and tertiary services of hospitals and in consequence, enable a significant increase in efficiency in comparison with the present situation. This project encompasses also the development of dedicated measures for improving the energy efficiency of hospitals. Thereby the central challenge is to determine comprehensively the costs and benefits of (innovative) projects within hospitals and thus, to enable the creation of a comprehensible basis for corresponding decision processes. For this purpose it is necessary to consider both quantitative and qualitative external and internal factors. The achieved results are to be documented in a form of a reference procedure model, which can be used as a guide for a (comparative) evaluation of one or more (innovative) projects, products or services and can be tailored to specific requirements of single application scenarios or hospitals. With the intention to achieve sustainable and practical results, the project encompasses both research oriented and practice-oriented work packages involving in total 25 interdisciplinary project partners working together in order to ensure the realization of project’s goals. The project focuses on the following work areas “energy efficiency”, “transparency” and “(human) assistive technology“.

Contributions of research group Information Systems and Enterprise Modelling
The research group Information Systems and Enterprise Modelling is in particular researching the topics Multi-Perspective Hospital Modeling as well as multi-perspective evaluation of innovative projects, products or services within the project Hospital Engineering.

Models are an established and widely accepted instrument for purposeful representation of existing or envisioned subjects of investigation allowing for reduction of complexity. Models aim at providing or increasing the transparency of the subject of investigation and therefore, at creating a basis of communication for involved or interested actors. One main area of research of Information Systems is enterprise modeling, i.e., creation of enterprises’ models. Usually, companies encompass various groups of actors with different professional competences, having different goals and thus, different perspectives on the company. Therefore, in order to create integrated enterprise models, which are at the same time tailored to the needs of various groups of actors, adequate modeling approach and method should be used. A modelling method allowing for accounting for different perspectives is Multi-perspective Modelling Method (MEMO). However, since hospitals, in contrast to traditional manufacturing or service providing organisations, are characterized by several specific features (such as e.g., usage of highly domain specific terminology, knowledge-intensive and highly flexible workflows as well as a traditional organisational structure but at the same time being expert organisations), it is necessary to modify or extend the existing MEMO-method in order to reflect the mentioned peculiarities of the domain (e.g., by reconstructing the relevant medical concepts from the domain of discourse) and allow for an intuitive creation and usage of multi-perspective hospital models by various involved actors. The developed enterprise models could serve as a foundation for comprehensive analysis of entire hospitals and performed processes, leading in consequence to reorganisation of existing or development of new action systems and in addition, modifications or designing and implementing new hospital information systems. The latter should focus on user-friendly interfaces and integration of different parts of hospital information systems in order to foster integration and avoid media discontinuities.

The concept of Enterprise Modelling is applied within the practice-oriented project Transparency in Material Management in the cooperation with Contilia Management GmbH and the Catheter Lab of Clinic for Cardiology and Angiology(directors: Priv.-Doz. Dr. Oliver Bruder, Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christoph K. Naber und Prof. Dr. Georg V. Sabin) of Elisabeth-Hospital in Essen. The project aims at supplying to the appropriate actors at the appropriate place and time, relevant information of high quality. In the first phase of the project, medical and administrative processes relevant in the context of cardiological diagnostics and treatment have been analysed and documented taking into account the information needs of involved actors i.e., medical staff, non-medical stuff and employees of cooperated purchase department as first step. For this purpose the cardiological procedures such as coronary angiography, percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) and cardiac pacemaker implantation have been documented in the form of process models and supplemented with resources as well as required and created documents. Then, accompanying processes of billing and ordering have been documented and analysed as well. The analysis aims at identifying type, extent and frequency of data to be processed as well as identifying possible media discontinuities or redundancies as consequence of multiple data processing by different actors in different processes and not integrated information systems. The gathered data allow for identification of potential improvement possibilities, which have been shown to the mentioned partners, and then discussed and evaluated. The performed process documentation and analysis of information needs, constituted a basis for identification and reconstruction, in the form of corresponding modelling concepts, all relevant medical resource types required for provision of medical services. This information can be used in the context of Multi-Perspective Hospital Modeling with the aim to answer medical, economical and technical questions tailored to the specific needs of various groups of actors.

The possible improvements, which have been identified through performed analysis, can be realized through (innovative) projects or introduction of (innovative) products or services. However first, it is necessary to perform a comprehensive and transparent evaluation of planned or possible changes taking into account the existing goals and strategies of the hospital as well as all involved groups of actors having different, possibly conflicting goals and assigning individual expectations to the envisioned/considered changes. With the intention to foster the acceptance of all actors, affected by envisioned changes, they should be involved from the beginning in the decision process. Against this background, it will be explored which actors respectively groups of actors use which evaluation criteria and priorities as a basis for a decision. In a following step, it should be explored, how evaluations of different groups of actors can be combined into one aggregated evaluation and then, be comprehensively visualized.

Project consortium 
An overview on all involved partners is available at project’s website.