Production control in hospital departments : Improving coordination through better optimization of IT-support tools at Astrid Lindgren Children´s Hospital, a Case Study at the Pediatric Oncology department

Abstract: A challenge for healthcare organizations is that operational efficiency suffers from variation in production. This is because variation in healthcare is hard to predict and the methods and IT-support tools for handling variation are suboptimal. The concept of production control can be used to describe the coordination of activities so that healthcare can be delivered on time, of adequate quality and at a reasonable cost, and thus includes the use of IT-support tools to handle variation. The objective of this report is to suggest improvements for production control in hospital departments through the development of a prototype for a new IT-support tool. In order to achieve this, a case study was conducted at the pediatric oncology department at Karolinska University Hospital (KS). The case study includes observations and interviews to investigate production control at department Q84, as well as associated roles and IT-support tools. Four IT-support tools were identified at the department, two of which were used interchangeably. Due to lack of integration between these systems and the fact that one system contained data manually synchronized from the other, handling changes required double labor. An improvement suggestion is therefore presented, consisting of a prototype which demonstrates that production control can be improved by automating the maintenance of a system at the department while fulfilling the organization’s information security policy. The development of the prototype was aligned with the lean philosophy which KS strives to adopt. Through an investigation of the production system, a role for production control and associated IT-support tools at a hospital department can be identified and analyzed and through the prototyping of an IT-support tool for production control, improvements and optimizations can be made.