How does System-Based Healthcare change the configuration of a hospital?

Here are a few sub-system components:

> "No Hidden Patient" -- What a NOW Hospital's Patient Care Centers and Units look like when it is designed around today's more critical patient, around the highest patient safety standards (even beyond regulatory agency requirements!) to the added benefit of today's older clinical nursing staff and today's more demanding payers for length-of-stay and cost management
READ articles in
Healthcare Design Magazine
Patient Safety and Quality Review Magazine
and
Trustee Magazine

> "Patient Administration" -- The NOW Hospital consolidates ALL non-clinical patient care planning and clinical support departments and services such as Admitting, Registration, Medical Records, Case Management, Patient Accounting, Patient Care Unit Secretaries, Home Health Administration, and so on, into one, flexible service resource center
(READ article in Healthcare Financial Management Magazine)

> "Patient Care Planning" -- Physicians can't and don't 'do it all'; they need proactive "input, throughput and output" planning assistance from Case Managers-turned-Patient-Care Planners to assure that evidence-based planning and decision-making don't fall apart at any point in the clinical delivery and patient care process
(Upcoming article in Lippincott's Case Management Magazine, December 2006)

> "The Mini-Hospital" -- The design of what used to be called an "emergency room" around a mini-model of a system-based "NOW Hospital". It's where patients don't have to be schlepped from the ER to one unit after another to get the care they need
(Read thearticle in Healthcare Design Magazine, November 2006)

> "The NOW Hospital" -- What a hospital looks like and how it operates when ALL sub-systems and components are working together in a system-based medical center: Patients get the care they need NOW! (Article forthcoming; Agreement in process)







> Among others

"You can't keep fixing
a Model-T and expect to
convert it into a Porsche."

Jeff Hardy, President
Healthcare Enterprise
Development Services

More articles

What is the origin of System-Based Healthcare?

Although Jeff Hardy, President of Healthcare Enterprise Development Services, is recognized as the conceptual founder of the System-Based Healthcare concept, he attributes the idea to several of his mentors at Kaiser Foundation Hospital and Clinics, Kaiser Medical Methods Research and Kaiser Foundation International. Over a 12-year period beginning in 1967, Jeff was mentored to become an "integrated operations and facility design expert" by: Daniel Fletcher, a Kaiser Hospitals and Clinics developer; Dr. Sydney A. Garfield, founder of the Kaiser Healthcare system with Henry J. Kaiser; Dr. Morris "Maury" Collins, operations guru of the Kaiser Hospital and Healthcare systems; Dr. Robert Richart, systems developer of Kaiser's Multiphasic Health Testing system; and Jeff's father, Charles J. Hardy, consultant to Region 9, Department of Health in Hawaii, and Hawaii State IRB; among others.

Jeff attributes the "System-Based Healthcare" nom de bardeau to a memorable Kaiser-orchestrated meeting in 1975 with C. West Churchman, one of the founding fathers of the fields of operational research, management science, and the "systems approach." Churchman was a University of California Berkeley B-School lecturer who had been on a retainer with Kaiser Foundation International. After discussing the "systems approach" to healthcare operations, Mr. Churchman left Jeff with his book, "The Design of Inquiring Systems"**. Mr. Churchman also left an indelible imprint on Jeff's thought process from that day, on. Recalling that meeting, Jeff says with a laugh "I had to re-boot my brain!"

* "The System-Based Approach to Health Care Restructuring -- AARC Times Interviews Jeffrey Hardy of XYDRA Corporation" AARC Times, July 1994 Read the article in .pdf

** C. West Churchman, New York, Basic Books, 1971