Meet two hospitals that have acquired a license for the Gestão Estratégica software free of charge and find out how they are increasing their results.
In July 2013, Stratec unveiled its first social responsibility project: a campaign to benefit hospitals served by the Unified Health System (SUS). The company gave up the license for its Gestão Estratégica software in order to actively contribute to improving public health in Brazil. As a result of this initiative, many hospitals are already using the system to carry out the hospital strategic management and with this, they optimize material and human resources and can expand their service capacities.
Martagão Gesteira Hospital is one of the beneficiaries of Stratec's hospital campaign. Since November 2013, they have been using the software to organize and monitor the institution's strategic management. For 48 years, the Martagão Gesteira Hospital has been treating children and adolescents from all over the state of Bahia. It treats pediatric cases in Salvador and the metropolitan region. It has 220 beds, more than 20 medical specialties, performs around 10,000 outpatient consultations a month and 700 surgeries a month through SUS, and is a reference for highly complex treatments such as neurosurgery, cardiology and oncology.
According to Ana Luiza da Cruz, the hospital's planning analyst, they saw on the internet that the campaign to acquire Gestão Estratégica software was suitable for them and signed up to find out more. "Stratec soon contacted us to explain that we didn't need to finance the license, just the support for the software. We liked the idea, signed up with Stratec and they immediately came to train us," says Ana.
She says that they are still in the process of training all the managers and leaders to use the software, as it has only just been installed in the hospital's routine. However, she is already seeing benefits: "We're trying to use it with the most open vision possible, covering even the operational side. Now we can consolidate information from strategic planning more easily, delegating the feeding of the software to the leaders and demanding a more active stance from the managers," she says. According to Ana, another advantage of installing the software in the hospital's routine has been the reduction in the loss of information compared to when they used Excel, as well as the distance between operations and management, which has been minimized. "We're managing to unify the information more. We're not getting lost as much. With Stratec's software we can extract information on a monthly basis. There are still some things to develop, but it's already making our work a lot easier," he says.
The Ministro Costa Cavalcanti Hospital in Foz do Iguaçu is also taking part in the campaign. Managed by the ITAIGUAPY Health Foundation, a private non-profit organization, the HMCC is a reference hospital for the 9th Health Region in the specialties of high-risk management, cardiology and oncology, as well as having the title of Child-Friendly Hospital. The institution performs an average of 1,083 hospitalizations and 17,050 outpatient visits per month.
According to Francielle Fucks, the hospital's quality management advisor, they found out about the campaign on the internet, analyzed the videos about the software and looked for more information about this system. "We held several videoconferences and also requested a license for testing. Once we saw that the software would suit us and that the offer was viable, we tried to sign a contract with the company for this partnership," says Francielle.
The Ministro Costa Cavalcanti Hospital implemented the software in November 2013 and after training managers, they began to register their action plans and actually started using the software in February this year. Now the tasks of feeding in indicator data, viewing graphs and filling in follow-up reports are in full swing.
"Our management model is geared towards management by guidelines, i.e. within strategic planning, initiatives are deployed at all levels, so everyone has a say and influences the positive or negative outcome of planning performance. In strategic planning we use Stratec's system to register and monitor strategic action plans and operational action plans, which we call guidelines and which are common to all managers and everyone must work on them through action plans, which will be monitored throughout the year," Francielle explains.
She says that before they implemented the software, the management of indicators, strategic planning, the construction of graphs and the analysis of results were carried out via Excel spreadsheets. This information was shared between managers, supervisors, coordinators and directors via e-mail, internal communication or in print. "The software was very well accepted by managers, not least because of the promise that we would no longer use Excel spreadsheets. The ease of accessing data from any computer with internet access and the standardization of information are an advantage," says Fracielle.
The quality management advisor says that it is still too early to assess whether there have been any resource savings in the hospital management after the implementation of Gestão Estratégica, but he can already see that it saves time, as he no longer has to spend hours building spreadsheets and graphs, which the software already provides automatically. "We can highlight the benefits of real-time monitoring of information by the institution's coordinators and directors, the possibility of accessing it from any computer, and the replacement of the many Excel spreadsheets."
Bruno Altoé, Stratec's regional account manager, realizes that Gestão Estratégica has helped hospitals achieve various accreditations, such as ONA and some ISOS, because they require institutions to have a specific tool for monitoring indicators, targets, action plans and the like. "The ease of use and speed with which graphs, beacons and other information are updated helps hospital management to take more assertive actions in a shorter period of time, as they don't waste time compiling data and generating graphs," he adds.
According to Altoé, hospital acceptance has been very good, although most of the hospitals are run by government agencies that aren't always willing to get to know the tool. "But at every presentation, their eyes light up," he confesses. Altoé says that for Stratec, this is an opportunity to help ensure that Brazil has a better healthcare system that can improve its processes. In the campaign, hospitals receive the software at cost price, pay only for monthly maintenance and receive the licenses free of charge. "Stratec's intention with the campaign is precisely to spread the culture of monitoring results more and more and to optimize the time spent analysing indicators, so that managers can devote more time to their duties than to compiling data for the monthly meeting," he says.
