Patient Flow Software Blog

Bringing Passion and Problem Solving to Patient Flow Logistics

Posted by Mary Cooper on Fri, Aug 30, 2013 @ 04:18 PM

A PFS original interview with Peter Van de Kerkhove, one of the industry’s leading innovators

Peter Van de Kerkhove is a man with a mission. A mission to provide hospitals with astandardized approach for coordinating and managing Patient Transport activities, using technology.

Peterpic

In fact, he’s had this mission for over 25 years, beginning with his job as a Project Manager for Process Improvement, working for a 900-bed medical center, in the Department of Operations (workflow) Analysis. It was in this position that Peter discovered he had a passion for Patient Transport and made it his personal mission to see it improved.

Today, he is seeing that mission realized as over 50 hospitals have benefited from his innovative breakthrough in transport technology, including those served by PFS, as he is one of our co-founders and a continued consultant.

Patient Logistics Reimagined

Peter’s Patient Transport technology was the first to document trip demands that fluctuated by hour of day and by day of week. In 1988 he helped to design and launch the first commercial application for managing hospital transports, which evolved into today’s PTS solution. Then he designed a bed management system which combined Bed Turnover management for Housekeeping and a Patient Placement application for Admitting and Bed Control.

Peter says, "I also integrated the solution with Transport, so that a Discharge Transport would automatically trigger the Bed “Dirty” and assign it to a Housekeeper. This was the first fully-integrated Capacity Management system in the industry, and it remained the only one for nearly 10 years, until enough hospitals started to have capacity issues.”

Peter continues to observe important new trends in the industry and to design solutions that fit with these trends. This is an excerpt from a recent interview about several of these trends.

A Focus on the Future 

patient transportation

Peter is predicting that the creation of "benchmark data" may be the next major breakthrough for this industry.

“Transport Services tend to be very customized and their workload mix and standards for trips follow suit, making it very difficult and confusing for hospitals that want “benchmark standards” to evaluate their operations.”

“Many have given up, but I haven’t because it is not impossible, just a little challenging. The challenge will be to establish a standard terminology for how “transport metrics” will be defined, tracked, measured and reported. The most confusing part will be to get everyone to accept a single set of “industry definitions” when companies with a transport system or module use different labels for the same metrics. I sense that we are getting very close to the day when that will happen....”

Full Interview 

The full interview addresses questions about current trends in the Patient Transport industry from one of the industry's leading innovators.

  • Do you want to be able to evaluate your patient transport performance against national standards?
  • Are you struggling to further centralize your existing transport model? Learn how even smaller hospitals are doing it.
  • Learn how to leverage the trend toward patient visibility, in order to help expand the scope of your centralized transport service.
  • Have you ever wondered… How centralized is my department relative to other centralized Transport services?
  • Have you been looking for a better way to rank the Utilization and Efficiency of your Transporters with a single balanced metric?

PFS thanks Peter Van de Kerkhove for sharing his industry knowledge and wisdom with us. If you are interested in receiving a copy of the complete interview with Peter, or interested in contacting Peter click here: contact Peter.

Topics: patient flow, patient transportation, patient transportation software, patient tracking, patient visibility