Before going to Barretos, I had had very limited exposure to the management and behind-the-scenes routines of a hospital. These past two months have given me a greater understanding of the complexity of the work required to make a hospital run smoothly.

Quality Checks

By 2018, the Hospital de Cancer de Barretos will have 16 prevention units around Brazil, with the main unit located in Barretos. The hospital has a reputation for a high quality of care. However, as you can imagine, it is difficult to keep track of all the units and maintain the standard of care.

To ensure consistency among units, the hospital uses quality dashboards assessing the efficiency of each unit and its technicians. These dashboards are located on screens around the prevention units. The dashboards that track technicians’ performance identify for each visit the technician, the patient, the pathology of the patient, and the patient waiting time. The dashboard bases the efficiency of the technician based on waiting time. Ideally, each patient should wait no more than 30 minutes (marked by the color green). If the waiting time is greater than 30 minutes, the color for the wait time changes to either yellow or red. This color coding makes it easy to immediately see which technicians are on schedule.

 

The dashboard for tracking quality at the unit level is similar, but instead of displaying the waiting time for each patient, it shows the number of patients seen, the goals for each month, and the amount of errors made in each visit (distinguishing between which errors are human and which errors are technical). The dashboard compares all the units so that the viewer can easily identify where the performance issues are and which units are meeting their targets.

 

When I first saw the dashboards, they caught my attention because they’re very simple to understand and relay a great deal of crucial information. This system for quality control seems to be working well for the hospital and it would be a great model to export to other hospitals.