Comprehensive Medical Competence Management in SAP

In practice, it is apparent that the required evidence is organized and documented in a wide variety of ways. The spectrum ranges from the classic hard copy on paper to lists in Excel or Word files to more or less sophisticated solutions for managing scanned documents. A central query of all persons who have been instructed in the handling of a specific device - possibly including the validity of their certificates - remains illusory under such circumstances.

However, the correct implementation of instructions and their legally compliant documentation are essential for patient safety. Instructions that have to be renewed according to defined schedules or follow-up training, for example due to software updates, bring additional complexity to the topic. The management of Tirol Kliniken was also confronted with this problem. The Austrian hospital operator employs around 8500 staff. The Innsbruck University Hospital alone - the largest of the four associated healthcare facilities - has more than 10,000 individual medical devices with 950 different types of equipment, the operation of which is only permitted after appropriate instruction.

"We didn't have an overall, house-wide overview of the status of referrals. Accordingly, our research effort for checks or audits was high," says Andreas Hlavac, describing the status quo before the implementation of the new competence management tool. He is responsible for the IT area of business management systems at Tirol Kliniken and played a key role in the development and introduction of the central documentation tool for device referrals.

Central documentation

After a thorough evaluation of the requirements, the management decided on the business case Competence Management from Snap Consulting's catalog of mobile applications for maintenance and technology, Maint for short. Specially developed to efficiently record and organize competencies in organizations, the application is characterized by unconditional runability in all SAP system landscapes, whether in old ERP environments or in the new S/4 world.

This provided a central documentation tool for legally compliant admissions with an electronic confirmation workflow. But the Tirol Kliniken wanted more. To keep the administrative effort low, catalogs for different training topics were to be created. These were to be centrally administrable and viewable by the trainees. Based on a collaborative development, the costs were shared and the desired workflows will be available to other customers in the next product update of Snap Maint.

The six-month implementation and a four-month pilot phase were followed by the roll-out to all facilities. And the Tirol Kliniken have continued to expand the functionality of the application for themselves. "In the meantime, we also use it to handle enrollments in software systems and mandatory training such as data protection, hygiene, cytostatics, i.e., those that are not subject to the Medical Devices Act. And we have also integrated our in-house e-learning platform," explains IT manager Hlavac. After 18 months in operation, 160,000 referral messages are documented in the new competence management system in a legally secure manner and can be retrieved centrally at any time.