Produktmerkmale

The importance of logistics

Due to rising cost pressure in health care it is becoming increasingly more important to find ways to reduce costs. In contrast to industry, in the health sector the logistics area has received considerably less attention. Software tools can greatly enhance the management of transports in hospitals (for patients and supplies) compared to the still common way of booking and dispatching transports manually. In the dispatch center, the transportation officer assigns transport requests booked by the hospital units using a computeraided system, to the available transport resources(vehicles and/or transport staff providing services on foot). Ideally, the transport staff receive thebooked requests electronically (PC-based viaintranet, PDA via wireless LAN, mobile phone). However, classical software tools lack the ability to support decision-making processes such as thereal-time dispatching of transport requests. Opti-TRANS® accomplishes this task by retrieving the information needed for decision-making from its data pool (travel times, capacities of the available means of transport, etc.). On-line optimizationalgorithms use this information to automatically dispatch transport requests. Long-term studies show that potential improvements between 15%and 20% can be achieved when optimization methods are employed to manage transports: the quality of the transport service increases (e.g. due toshorter waiting times for patients) and the costsdecrease (e.g. due to lower travel times andimproved resource usage).

Our approach

Opti-TRANS® is a software application for optimal dispatching, monitoring and tracking in-housetransports of patients and supplies in hospitals. The entire process chain is embedded in the dataflow, ranging from the integration of the tool intoan existing hospital information system (HIS), the web-aided booking of transport requests, to seamless communication modes for transport staff. The software tool is suitable not only for hospitals operating a fleet of vehicles but also for hospitals with staff operating on foot. Hospital units canbook their transport requests over a web-based order form that is connected with the HIS to permit the retrieval of necessary data (e.g. patient information). Transport requests are booked with all necessary data such as desired time for pickup or delivery, priority of the transport, special required equipment and ancillary transport means. Hospital unitshave on-line access to information about the status of all outgoing and incoming requests at any time. When the optimization modul  is used, booked transports are automatically assigned to transportteams and optimized routes are suggested. The proposed routes can be subsequently manually modified by the dispatcher. A flexible, configurable user interface assists the dispatcher, e.g. through a visual representation of assigned requests to transport teams/vehicles over a time scale (Ganttchart). Communication with transport staff is maintained using various electronic devices. For example, staff can receive new transport requests over a handheld device such as a PDA and in turn confirm the status of the current request. A recall function reminds the transport staff to notify the system of the status of each assigned transport.

Optimization

Transport requests are automatically dispatched in real-time using intelligent optimization algorithms developed at the Fraunhofer Institute forIndustrial Mathematics (ITWM), Germany. This is accomplished by generating suitable routes for the available vehicles/transport teams based on the requirements of the booked trips. In addition, several optimization criteria can be specified, e.g.minimization of the travel times. The user manages the optimization criteria by assigning priorities to the individual criteria. The outcome is an optimized usage of the available resources (transportteams and means), a reduction of the travel times, a decrease in the number of empty trips (i.e. trips without a patient) and a reduction of the waitingtimes for patients.