New Delhi: Siemens Healthineers’ development centre in Bengaluru holds a yearly event dedicated to ferreting out teams and individuals within the company who make remarkable contributions and excel in multiple disciplines. This year’s winners of the ‘Dare’ category – where employees dare to take steps boldly in spite of the chance of failure – was the team that built a healthcare workforce management solution. Called CrewPlace Enterprise, the product has been hugely successful, having been adopted in hospitals in the US and India, and now making headway in countries like Singapore, Japan, and China.COVID made us all realise how much medical professionals mean to us. But medical personnel are at the mercy of schedules, planning, and execution. Balaji Balakrishnan, general manager of research development for customer services digital at Siemens Healthineers, who headed the team that won the Dare award, says their research encouraged them to think about how to make scheduling of healthcare workers more efficient. “We spoke to our customers to understand the pressing issues that needed to be addressed. Interestingly, they all said that around 18 per cent to 20 per cent of their workforce is not utilised effectively. In a shift of around eight hours, for around two hours the workforce is in chaos because of different workflows and changes that take place on a daily basis. They are unable to even fulfil the demands of their own shifts,” he says.This problem statement was the genesis of CrewPlace Enterprise, but the platform became successful, says Balakrishnan, because of all the added functionalities and features the Siemens Healthineers’ engineering team incorporated.
At its heart, CrewPlace Enterprise is a mobile-based healthcare workforce management solution that helps healthcare providers to orchestrate, optimise, and organise their shift planning and staff management. Where it gets complicated, and in turn innovative and useful, says Balakrishnan, is the wide range of workforce digitalisation tools included in the platform that helps with aspects like resource dispatch functionality, shift-swaps, managing a remote workforce, and having access to talent pools. It also helps staff collaborate among their colleagues for a more flexible schedule and training opportunities.
You could, for example, ensure that the correct healthcare workers are waiting to meet the patient before they have even reached the hospital. A simple step that can cut down on the uni versally abhorred hospital waiting times.
And all of this is completely automated, stresses Balakrishnan. “We call them command centres. The system allots staff based on the need of the situation, based on the expertise in demand, or based on a situation of shortage of workforce in different locations. As a worker, I will know precisely where I have to go, and for what reason I have been called for.”
CrewPlace figures out the qualifications of healthcare workers via multiple ways. Balakrishnan notes that there are several country regulations for different skill sets in healthcare, which the platform relies on.
The platform is also opening up to AR and VR modules in iOS and Android OS. “With this, I’ll be able to see patient data without even being in any particular environment. I will also get an understanding of where and what the surgeon is equipped with, what level of skill set he has, what level of skill set the support staff has.”
The team’s first foray into developing the platform was plagued by delayed regulatory clearances, soaring operational costs, and failed customer rollouts. The end-user experience left much to be desired. “As a society we do not celebrate failure. The whole intent of the Dare award category is to encourage teams to step up boldly and to learn from failures to see how you can turn failures to success stories,” says Balakrishnan.
The learnings led to the establishment of a competence centre in native mobile app development and niche technologies, and in gaining complete end-to-end product ownership inhouse and mastering new processes for app releases. This should now enable the India centre to do a lot more. And faster.
