International Award for Managerial Innovations in Healthcare Presented by IHF and Arthur Andersen.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark--(BW HealthWire)--June 22, 1999--

Arthur Andersen and the International Hospital Federation (IHF) recently honored three healthcare institutions for their creative managerial leadership achievements. Representatives from the three recipient institutions--Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, Aga Khan University Hospital, and Arthur Davison Children's Hospital--received the 1999 Arthur Andersen/Dr. Ed Crosby International Award for Managerial Innovation before more than 800 attendees at the bi-annual IHF meeting.

In 1991, in conjunction with the IHF, Lloyd B. Morgan, healthcare partner at Arthur Andersen, developed the award criteria for the program. Morgan presented this year's awards in Copenhagen.

"We are encouraged by the development and implementation of local solutions that can be emulated by other organizations," said Morgan. "By sharing these quality improvements made by the award recipients, we can help to raise the standard of healthcare delivery worldwide."

First place award winner, the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, implemented an extensive clinical reengineering project that optimized its efficiency and made it a leader in its local market. A team of clinicians and administrators examined the delivery of care for individual diagnoses and developed patient-focused clinical pathways that standardized treatment and improved efficiency in the facility. The hospital used evidence-based medicine and benchmarking against other institutions to support clinical decisions that resulted in streamlining service systems from 54 separate units to 14 integrated diagnosis-based centers.

Two institutions were awarded as finalists: Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, and Arthur Davison Children's Hospital in Ndola, Zambia.

International studies have suggested that up to 20 percent of all hospital drug administration procedures are erroneous. In response, Aga Khan University Hospital conducted an internal study and discovered that most errors occurred within manual prescription writing, order transcription and pharmacy order entry stages. A team of medical professionals and computer programmers created a computerized Physician Order Entry system that eliminated incomplete and illegible orders, thus reducing delivery time from an average of 115 minutes to an average of 35 minutes, resulting in timely and accurate medical care delivery.

The Arthur Davison Children's Hospital faced problems of a different sort when it was informed that its major source of funding, the Zambian government, would be making cutbacks in the hospital's budget. Hospital administrators conducted brainstorming sessions with managers from each department to cut superfluous expenditures. The result: benefit policies were revised to eliminate overtime, and new policies were employed to control travel and fuel costs. Each department is now required to produce a zero-based monthly budget and implement other revenue-enhancing ideas to buffer the effects from the cuts in government funding.

With members in over 90 nations, the International Hospital Federation promotes and facilitates the international cross-fertilization of best practices between healthcare organizations in management and training, planning and healthcare policy. IHF is an independent, non-political body that conducts health services educational events and publishes widely in the fields of health planning and management. The award's namesake, Dr. Ed Crosby, helped the IHF pursue these goals as head of the American Hospital Association in the 1960s. Crosby became president of the IHF in 1963.

Arthur Andersen is a global professional services organization consisting of over 100 member firms and more than 70,000 people united by a single worldwide operating structure and a common culture of innovation and knowledge sharing. This unique "one-firm" approach qualifies the people of Arthur Andersen to serve clients by bringing together any of more than 40 competencies in a way that transcends geographic borders and organizational lines. Arthur Andersen's people provide effective business solutions to over 100,000 clients in 81 countries around the world. Since its beginning in 1913, Arthur Andersen has realized 85 years of uninterrupted growth. With revenues of more than US$6 billion, it stands today as a world leader in professional services. Arthur Andersen is a business unit of Andersen Worldwide.