Molinette Hospital Makes High Value
Breakthroughs with TrakCare

Hospitals worldwide are looking for ways to solve healthcare’s care/cost conundrum – how to improve care delivery while also cutting costs. San Giovanni Battista Hospital (Molinette), in Turin, Italy has implemented a breakthrough solution to the puzzle with TrakCare.

One of the largest hospitals in Italy, Molinette treats approximately 60,000 inpatients annually and about 15,000 ambulatory patients receive healthcare at Molinette every day. The 1400-bed hospital is also at Italy’s top tier in terms of delivering complex critical care. One example: about 300 organ transplants and the same number of bone marrow transplants are performed annually in this incredibly busy healthcare hub.

Maximising value, cutting costs

The combination of large size and care complexity makes it absolutely essential for Molinette to maximise the value received from every technology investment. Implementing TrakCare has enabled hospital executives to achieve that objective.

Molinette utilises the Visual Basic version of TrakCare to automate virtually all major hospital areas including inpatient, outpatient, emergency, radiology, day hospital and day services, resource booking, oncological pharmacy, and order entry. Patient data is stored in a single, secure electronic patient record (ePR), which is easily accessible to care providers throughout the hospital.

Since TrakCare was rolled out, revenues have substantially increased while costs have been significantly cut, according to Dr. Claudio Plazzotta, who heads up the Controller’s office at Molinette. For example, the TrakCare ePR has made it possible to dramatically reduce data lost during the patient registration process. Since reimbursements from the regional government in the public Italian healthcare system are directly tied to supplying valid data on patient registrations, information accuracy is absolutely critical throughout the complex reimbursement process. As a result of the major reduction in lost patient information since installing TrakCare, Molinette has cut revenue losses from 10M to 1M Euros – a stunning 90 percent reduction.

“The time needed to get patient data submitted for reimbursement
has gone from two days to effectively real-time.”

--Dr. Claudio Plazzotta
Office of Controller
Molinette

TrakCare has also enabled Molinette to improve the overall quality of registration data to increase the coding weight specified by the Italian government from 1.8 to 2.4. In a healthcare system where the average coding weight of hospitals throughout the country is only 1.3, Molinette is at the top of the pyramid in terms of the quality of its epidemiological statistics. The code weight improvement also means a major reimbursement increase from the regional government. TrakCare has also made it possible to speed up revenue realisation. “The time needed to get patient data submitted for reimbursement has gone from two days to effectively real-time,” Dr. Plazzotta says.

Improving care delivery, increasing user satisfaction

Even more critical than the measurable bottom-line deliverables enabled by TrakCare are the improvements in care delivery made possible since the health information system went live. Precious physician and nurse time formerly dedicated to producing the forms needed for the bureaucratic reimbursement process has been freed up so clinicians can better focus on activities of direct value to patients, according to Dr. Massimo Lauretta, who oversees the hospital’s logistics area. “Before implementing TrakCare, we didn’t have the data needed to support the implementation of needed changes in the care delivery process,” he says. “TrakCare provides the objective data needed to make physicians accept process changes.”

Molinette nurses are also pleased with the value they perceive is being delivered by TrakCare. Trained users reported a 96 percent satisfaction rate in terms of TrakCare meeting expectations, based on a Molinette survey.

Future plans call for using TrakCare to make clinical and administrative information more accessible than ever before. “Real-time information delivery, instantaneous data visibility, high performance, and 24-hour reliability make TrakCare a high-value success,” Dr. Plazzotta concludes.