St. Antonius Hospital Improves Laboratory efficiency with Dimensional Insight®

Efficient Labs: The Data Advantage

Cost Monitoring and Control

Dimensional Insight’s solution provides St. Antonius Hospital with a real-time overview of lab requests and lab production, allowing the hospital to monitor agreements with care units and stay within budget. This real-time insight enhances cost control.

Accelerated Reporting

The hospital now generates annual reports much faster than before, reducing the time needed to assess data accuracy and financial performance.

Earnings Structure Visibility

Dimensional Insight exposes the earning structure of the lab, helping the hospital understand where earnings are derived and whether price agreements align with actual costs incurred.

Data Integration

The solution integrates data from various systems, including the GLIMS Laboratory Information System, providing a comprehensive view of all data in one location.

Single Version of the Truth

By using Dimensional Insight, St. Antonius Hospital eliminates data discrepancies and ensures that its production environment serves as the single

Process Improvement

The hospital can now quickly analyze lab processes and make data-driven decisions, resulting in faster and more efficient operations.

Enhanced Clinical Answers

Antonius Hospital aims to optimize application packages to provide clinical answers more cost-effectively, benefiting both the hospital and doctors.

Rapid Implementation

The implementation of Dimensional Insight’s solution was completed within weeks, providing the hospital with a powerful analytics tool in a short timeframe.

Dimensional Insight’s solution provides insight into laboratory costs at St. Antonius Hospital

The Clinical Chemical Laboratory of St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein wanted to be able to extract management and control information from its Laboratory Information System, but above all, the organization wanted to gain insight into costs and processes. To be able to quickly and directly consult all data that the lab collects and manages in its existing systems, the Clinical Chemical Laboratory uses Dimensional Insight’s solution.

Up-to-date insight into costs and revenues

Dimensional Insight quickly provides the hospital with overviews of lab requests and lab production. Van Loon says, “We can now monitor our agreements with the care units and warn them in time if they exceed the budget. We can send the reports to the departments on a monthly basis or even provide them with up-to-date updates online.”

Annual reports

“It used to take days to see the annual production, and then you still needed a lot of knowledge to be able to assess whether the data was correct,” says van Loon. “With Dimensional Insight, I now have online access to all data in seconds, and if I want to update it every day, I can. Making annual reports is now much faster.”

Douwe van Loon, manager of the Clinical Chemical Laboratory at St. Antonius Hospital Nieuwegein

“Our database has something like 180 tables, many analyzers are linked to it, and we produce more than 3 million results a year. And of course, we want answers quickly from that enormous amount of data.”

Douwe van Loon

Manager of the Clinical Chemical Laboratory, St. Antonius Hospital Nieuwegein

Insight into earning structure

“Dimensional Insight fully exposes the earning structure of the lab and provides insight into where the earnings are,” van Loon says. “We also see whether the price agreements made correspond to the costs actually incurred. The data is refreshed every day and can quickly display everything from a very high aggregate level to a detailed level. Reports are generated at lightning speed and appear directly on the dashboard.”

Unlock GLIMS and other databases

The Clinical Chemical Laboratory uses GLIMS Laboratory Information System. Van Loon says, “GLIMS is not primarily intended for making advanced reports and integrating source data that is recorded outside of GLIMS. That is why the supplier MIPS itself referred us to Dimensional Insight. The company’s solution actually lays a shell around our systems. And via the Dimensional Insight dashboard we can retrieve the current desired data from all those systems.”

“It quickly became clear to me that Diver saves me a lot of time and hassle.”

Douwe van Loon

Manager of the Clinical Chemical Laboratory, St. Antonius Hospital Nieuwegein

Single version of the truth

“We had too many translations of data,” says van Loon. “It went from me to IT and back again, and then to finance. It’s not surprising, then, that there was often a discrepancy between our annual report and that of the hospital. That is no longer the case. With Dimensional Insight, our own production environment is the single version of the truth. We now see our own production figures in the hospital’s annual report.”

Improve lab processes

“Suppose I want to know if the tube can go through the system in an hour instead of half an hour,” van Loon says. “Without Dimensional Insight, I needed two days to map the turnaround time of the tube with a new method. Then it was three weeks waiting for the results, measuring again, and again three weeks of waiting. In the meantime, the working group had collapsed. Now I do the zero measurement, turn on the device, ask Dimensional Insight’s solution the question, and within seconds I have the numbers. Then we work with the working group to test our new working method and the next day I know if it works.”

Clinical answers cheaper

“Not only can we work faster, cheaper, and more efficiently with Dimensional Insight’s solution, we also want to see if we can do better. One example is looking at the content of what the doctors are requesting. If the lab can help them to optimize the application packages, we can help them to get the clinical answer in a cheaper way. The easiest thing for a doctor is, of course, to tick the entire application list from top to bottom. That is fast for them, but not cheap. So there is still a lot to be gained there.”

Clinical answers cheaper

“Not only can we work faster, cheaper, and more efficiently with Diver, we also want to see if we can do better. One example is looking at the content of what the doctors are requesting. If the lab can help them to optimize the application packages, we can help them to get the clinical answer in a cheaper way. The easiest thing for a doctor is of course to tick the entire application list from top to bottom. That is fast for them, but not cheap. So there is still a lot to be gained there.”

Implementation of weeks, not months

“Our question was simple: we want to be able to count, know numbers, and keep track. But how do we get it out of the system? We provided Dimensional Insight with a sample file from our annual production and asked a number of questions that we wanted to see again. We were very surprised that the company presented a working tool within a few weeks.”

Continue to explore with with Data-Driven Insights

“When the dashboard was ready, a whole new world of data was opened for us that suddenly became available. Suddenly there is so much more. The system is also flexible and easy to adjust. Dimensional Insight makes data current and alive. We will certainly adjust the use of Dimensional Insight’s solution over time, because we are not a company that sits still. For example, we want to access the data via the web, so that each specialty with its own login code can view its own activities, per specialist or per department. Simply log in. That is transparency.”

About Laboratory Advisor

In today’s fast-paced healthcare landscape, medical laboratories grapple with mounting data, tight budgets, and ever-evolving regulations. Enter Dimensional Insight’s Laboratory Advisor. This robust, user-friendly platform seamlessly integrates data from your Laboratory Information System (LIS) with other key areas like finance and production. From management to medical scientists, everyone gains invaluable insights. No more time-consuming data queries; now, application managers can swiftly generate reports, ensuring diagnostic centers operate at their peak. Elevate your lab’s efficiency and quality assurance with Laboratory Advisor!

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Organization

Clinical Chemical Laboratory of St. Antonius Hospital Nieuwegein

Industry

Healthcare

Employees 

155

Challenge

Gain insight into business operations from complex and disconnected databases.

Solution

Diver Platform

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