Reimagined materials management

Aarhus University Hospital (AUH) is the second-largest hospital in Denmark with over 900 beds and 9,000 employees. The hospital covers the majority of all specialised services in Denmark. Known for its robust research, AUH conducts roughly 83,000 surgeries annually and has one of the shortest patient length of stays across Europe.

AUH is consistently ranked as the top hospital in Denmark. According to Newsweek Magazine, AUH was ranked 19th in the global Smart Hospital rankings. Hospitals on the list “lead in their use of artificial intelligence, robotic surgery, digital imaging, telemedicine, smart buildings, information technology infrastructure and electronic health records.” The majority of these hospitals are in the US and AUH is among just four European hospitals in the top 20.

The hospital puts particular emphasis on a whole-person approach, creating results through collaboration and having the highest levels of professionalism.

The hospital sought collaboration with industry to glean external perspectives to function in the most efficient ways possible. AUH wanted to leverage innovation and data, particularly around operating room activities to free up capacity – both financially and on the nursing side.

To address this challenge, AUH decided to collaborate with Medtronic, in part due to the company’s experience optimising managed services in more than 150 hospitals in 20 different countries. AUH prioritised the Neurosurgery Department as a starting point for the partnership. Depending on the results, AUH and Medtronic could then partner in other departments.

Medtronic and the Neurosurgery Department aligned on the following five partnership outcomes: 

• Optimise and professionalise core activities such as operational planning and the use of resources. 
• Reduce waste and free up nurse resources.
• Bring new competencies in terms of operational optimisation and planning. 
• Strengthen the organisation and ensure the well-being and engagement of employees. 
• Leverage international benchmarking, collaboration and knowledge exchange with other university hospitals.

There were various components to the partnership. Two particular solutions are highlighted below.

Medtronic’s work on materials management initially involved a comprehensive review and the creation of a department Procedure Catalogue. The team input all products into a Medtronic cloud-based software system to better understand usage for specific procedures.

The start-up phase took three months, and Medtronic then launched the service delivery stage in February 2020. Two Medtronic employees are on site every weekday to manage all aspects of materials management: ordering and receiving, filling up products, collaborating with nurses about their different needs around materials management, scanning what has been used and storage room optimisation, among other priorities.

These Medtronic experts are considered part of the hospital team. As a result of the datainformed decisions, the hospital stopped ordering “for stock purposes“. Instead, the focus was on the actual consumption data.

Decisions and actions could then be taken based on the different materials’ unique risk product portfolio. These actions prevent the discarding of expired materials.

With the insights gleaned from the Medtronic process on materials management, the Neurosurgery Department was able to immediately save 5 million Danish krone (DKK), which is approximately 675,000 Euro. These savings were achieved within the first year of the partnership. The waste reduction is at 3.9 million DKK to date (still counting).

Medtronic took over the logistics processes from nurses in the department. This freed up nursing capacity. Approximately two nurse fulltime equivalents have been released.