Towards a Digital Lean Hospital: Concept for a Digital Patient Board and Its Integration with a Hospital Information System

Lean management applied to healthcare aims at creating maximum value for patients by reducing waste and waits. It puts the patient's needs center stage, emphasizes employee involvement and continuous improvement. To realize this, visual tools such as the huddle board or the patient board are implemented in hospital wards. The boards are currently realized by whiteboards or flipcharts, which leads to duplicated data entries and loss of information. The objective of this work is to introduce a concept for digitalizing the patient board and integrate with a hospital information system (HIS)for improved data availability. Data on appointments, personnel planning and master patient data can be directly accessed from the HIS database. A digital patient board has several benefits: data can be collected from information systems, making it obsolete to record information several times. Even more functionalities, in particular, those supporting the communication between a patient and a healthcare team can be included by means of a digital board which improves patient involvement.