Alfonso Varela, assistance director of the Sanitary Area of Santiago de Compostela y Barbanza.
The Process management it is the key to making healthcare systems more efficient and sustainable. This is the premise that defends Alfonso Varela, care director of the Sanitary Area of Santiago de Compostela and Barbanza. “We have very complex and interrelated health systems that work as a whole,” he assured. For this reason, he continues, “with process management, the patient becomes the essential healthcare axis, around which actions are planned”.
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Full intervention by Alfonso Varela, assistance director of the Sanitary Area of Santiago de Compostela y Barbanza |
“The complexity of the health system means that it is not easy for patients to move through it, between its levels and services”, he warned during his speech at the conference Organización Sanitaria Innovadora Santiago de Compostela y Barbanza Areaan event organized by Medical Writing and the Spanish Society of Health Directors (SEDISA)with the sponsorship of Boehringer Ingelheim and the collaboration of Abbot y Air Liquide Healthcare.
A very complex health
And it is that, as he maintains, “Our healthcare is complex, departmentalized and highly specialized, so it has little capacity to adapt”. With process management, the patient becomes the essential healthcare axis, around which actions are planned. Thus, the processes are carried out under a “horizontal and matrix management”. In this way, “patient needs are identified” and the attention and care responses they need are coordinated. In addition, the costs of the activity and the quality with which the care processes are carried out can be marked.
“We have to give a logical order to the process by which Medicine is practiced, and thus obtain an optimal and predictable result”, he maintains. In this sense, he states that one of the weaknesses of health systems is their difficulty in “evaluating and measuring” the results of the operations they carry out. “Health is used to measuring activity and not results”.
The impact of process management
Along these same lines, Varela has insisted that in health “we have a lot of information in different unconnected containers”. Therefore, as she has assured, “in order to propose a management strategy by processes, we must be clear about what we want to prioritize”. In the case of the Sanitary Area of Santiago de Compostela and Barbanza, it has been advanced that “patient expectations” have been prioritized. “We have focused on knowing the most frequent causes of admission and death” in order to make decisions.
Also, as stated, and to give an example, in the Sanitary Area of Santiago they have managed to “delay two and a half years the advance of chronic and cardiac diseases”. “Is this because treatments have improved? Yes, but it is also due to advances in process management, which has facilitated the implementation of the latest advances in healthcare”, he concluded.
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Alfonso Varela during the conference Innovative Health Organization Area of Santiago de Compostela and Barbanza, an event organized by Medical Writing and the Spanish Society of Health Directors (SEDISA). |
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