Benchmarking logistics services in German hospitals: A research status quo

Abstract

Benchmarking is a powerful tool to provide organizations performance. Since the past years German hospitals are facing several reforms to lower their costs and raise their performance. Especially logistics services e.g. patient transport or catering logistics are appropriate and necessary to improve. The German research project BELOUGA develops a new Benchmarking approach for logistics services based on three case studies patient transport logistics, medical goods supply and operation personnel resource scheduling to reveal potentials for increasing hospitals performance. The paper shows the research status quo

Benchmarking healthcare logistics processes – a comparative case study of Danish and US hospitals

“…Quality seems to be a recurring aspect identified in this study and benchmarking literature within healthcare logistics (Hastreiter et al, 2013;S. M. Lee et al, 2011;Longo & Masella, 2002), service logistics (Altuntaş Vural & Tuna, 2016;Blumberg, 1994;Kilibarda, Zečević, & Vidović, 2012;Thai, 2013), and manufacturing logistics (Bagchi, 1996;Daugherty, Dröge, & Germain, 1994;Landeghem & Persoons, 2001).…”

“…Jehle and colleagues apply a benchmarking approach to patient transport logistics to identify areas for improvement (Jehle et al, 2015). Finally, Hastreiter and colleagues conduct a benchmarking study of patient transport in hospitals to identify areas for improvement (Hastreiter, Buck, Jehle, & Wrobel, 2013). Thus, different process improvement tools have been applied and tested for the bed logistics process, including benchmarking.…”

“…Hastreiter and colleagues identified 19 articles relevant to benchmarking logistics services in hospitals and found that the topic has gained importance in recent years. However, the limited number of relevant articles included in the review suggests that literature on this topic remains scarce (Hastreiter et al, 2013).…”

“…Along the same lines, Hastreiter and colleagues propose a benchmarking approach for healthcare logistics services that measures productivity, quality and costs. This approach is applied to six German hospitals to enable comparison of logistics service performance (Hastreiter et al, 2013). Similarly, Jehle and colleagues perform a benchmarking study of patient transport logistics in six German hospitals measuring productivity, quality and costs.…”

Semantic Context Consolidation and Rule Learning for Optimized Transport Assignments in Hospitals

“…Hence, they are investigating ways to optimize care delivery processes. One area of interest is the organization of logistic services, which may account for more than 30% of hospital costs [4]. Logistic operations in hospitals require more resources than reasonable, both in terms of staff responsible for scheduling and dispatching the activities and in terms of executing them.…”