Health economic benefit of medical device products through analysis of alternative treatment pathways.

Due to the con­stant­ly chang­ing frame­work con­di­tions, man­u­fac­tur­ers of med­ical tech­nol­o­gy prod­ucts must be able to react flex­i­bly. Legal changes, grow­ing cus­tomer demands on prod­uct qual­i­ty and inno­va­tions in the med­ical device indus­try lead to strong cost and com­pet­i­tive pres­sure for med­ical tech­nol­o­gy prod­uct manufacturers.

In coop­er­a­tion with Philips, the Insti­tute for Work­flow Man­age­ment in Health­care (IWiG) con­duct­ed a project to ana­lyze the health eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits of med­ical tech­nol­o­gy under the direc­tion of Prof. Dr. rer. oec. Dipl. Soz.-Päd. Michael Greiling.

The Philips Intel­liVue Guardian Solu­tion (IGS) with Ear­ly Warn­ing Score was ana­lyzed under the aspect of eco­nom­ic effi­cien­cy. The appli­ca­tion sup­ports staff on gen­er­al wards in close­ly mon­i­tor­ing patients, detect­ing crit­i­cal changes in their state of health at an ear­ly stage and ini­ti­at­ing the nec­es­sary measures.

Using the award-win­ning ClipMed PPM soft­ware solu­tion, five dif­fer­ent treat­ment path­ways for hip TEP were com­pared. The mod­el­ing of the treat­ment paths and a sub­se­quent analy­sis in con­junc­tion with an activ­i­ty-based cost­ing gen­er­at­ed trans­paren­cy by map­ping and cal­cu­lat­ing changes and improve­ments in the process flow in detail through the use of the IGS. The infor­ma­tion obtained pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion on the eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits of the application.

The results showed that stan­dard care with­out IGS, while sac­ri­fic­ing a num­ber of qual­i­ta­tive advan­tages, is only mar­gin­al­ly less expen­sive. Patients ben­e­fit from greater safe­ty, and physi­cians and nurs­ing staff expe­ri­ence a notice­able reduc­tion in work­load. Philips IGS enables com­pli­ca­tions to be detect­ed in good time, so that cost­ly inten­sive care can be prevented.