Applied business process management: An information systems approach to improve service delivery in public hospitals of low‐ and middle‐income countries

Abstract

AbstractSouth African public hospitals are faced with many challenges comprising inefficient processes, lack of digitalisation, severe austerity measures, and the rising burden of disease. Irrespective of the many existing initiatives in place, a critical challenge is the shortage of necessary resources required to fund, implement, and sustain new interventions. This deprives public hospitals from the efficiencies and quality of service experienced in private hospitals or other business entities. Through a case study strategy, this paper has abstracted two practice contributions. First, it describes and prescribes a low‐cost approach in which business process redesign was applied in a public hospital through a partnership between the hospital and a higher learning institution. The initiative involved third year students majoring in Information Systems performing, as part of their class project, process analysis at the hospital at no cost to the hospital other than their employees' time. The second contribution is a priority list of redesign and lean management principles that were abstracted from these initiatives. These include improving staff training, distributing and adhering to up‐to‐date standard operating procedures, performing tasks in parallel rather than in series, reducing handovers by avoiding certain tasks, incentivizing use of existing mobile software by doctors, developing low‐cost task automation solutions such as Microsoft Office applications, redesigning and standardizing forms, capturing data at source electronically rather than later, redesigning physical spaces, and improved key performance indicators and reporting. The study confirms the usefulness of this collaborative business process redesign approach for public hospitals as stakeholders got relevant information and practical, low‐cost, creative solutions with the potential to improve efficiencies and subsequently service delivery.