From 25 May to 27 May we had the opportunity to attend and participate in the 16th Conference on Health Management and Evaluation organized by the ‘Fundación Signo’.

The event was held at the Andalusian School of Public Health in Granada and brought together more than 400 healthcare professionals and managers, who shared their experiences at various conferences, round tables, and workshops.

The theme of the conference was ‘People and technology: drivers of change’, a concept very much in line with MYSPHERA’s philosophy and for which our CEO, Salvador Vera, was invited to take part in two fascinating panel discussions:

1st Roundtable | Opportunities from Europe in Technological Innovation: Managing projects for improvement

Moderator: Shabs Rajasekharan CTIO of Hiris care
Speakers:

• Cristina Bescós Director of Innovation EIT Health E.V
• Salvador Vera Manero CEO MYSPHERA
• José Julián Isturitz Pérez General Director of Patrimony and Contracting of the Canary Islands Government

During the talk, the opportunities offered by Europe and their management by public entities were discussed. In this line, José Julián Isturitz stated that it is possible that the autonomous governments are not capable of managing more than 40% of the funds that are going to be received, and stressed that the most complicated, and at the same time most important, is to know how to identify which projects are those that genuinely contribute value to health.

Meanwhile, Cristina Bescós highlighted that ‘in order to achieve success in projects, it is important to tackle them in a staggered manner, establishing clear stages. If something doesn’t work, it has to be stopped’. According to Bescós, ‘projects are now being paused when they are not on the right track, given that the management of public funds is a great responsibility and we must ensure that the projects that are implemented are useful in the long term.

Regarding the European Union’s initiatives for financing projects, Salvador Vera said that he considered the EIC one of the Commission’s great successes. Since it finances as an investor and, in addition, it is a program that channels projects through entrepreneurship, a great reinforcement for start-ups and SMEs and the path to follow so that innovations do not remain in a drawer.

Another of the aspects addressed during the round table was the current state of public procurement.

According to José Julián, the current system helps corporations and harms start-ups. In fact, he stated that the economic solvency that many calls for proposals present is a filter of ‘comfort’ so as not to receive a multitude of responses.

As for Salvador Vera, he strongly agreed and reaffirmed this: ‘In order to be able to compete in large competitions, we ally ourselves with the corporations’.

In fact, he expressed that from a Scale-Up like MYSPHERA it is necessary to select the channels conscientiously and the fact that they are certified is to certain extent self-control and a win-win for both.

Bescós also agreed with the previous words, stating that ‘we are putting many bureaucratic obstacles in the way of entrepreneurs, which we must try to solve from collaborative environments’.

“I see a barrier between the relationship between companies and public bodies. It seems to be a problem. We should use the Public Market Consultation to launch public-private partnerships. The gap between the public and the private sector penalizes technological progress aimed at improving healthcare,” said José Julián in response to the words of the other speakers.

Friday 27 May: Lean Healthcare – Experiences

Moderator: Anna Ochoa, Strategic Health Consultant. ESSENTIA Health Management

Speakers:

• Sara Manjón, Manager of the Consorci Hospitalari de Vic and the Fundació Hospital de la Santa Creu de Vic.
• Fernando Franco, Deputy Surgical Director and Surgical Process Coordinator (acting) Complejo Asistencial Universitario de Salamanca.
• Marc Sales, Director of Processes and co-founder of Essentia Health Project
• Salvador Vera, CEO MYSPHERA

On the concept of Lean Healthcare, Anna Ochoa opened the debate by stating that we need to improve patient care and eliminate inefficiencies in management.

“Patient and professional safety is an issue to be addressed”.

According to Ochoa, “data analysis must be used to improve”. And to achieve this, it must begin by changing organizations and making them ‘flatter and less hierarchical.

“We have to change the way we work. This is where the Lean Healthcare tool comes in”.

As Marc Sales sees it, years ago it was impossible for the word Lean to be associated with the healthcare sector. Things are changing and there are more and more engineers in healthcare focused on process improvement’.

Sales said that ‘you have to draw the picture of the process and support the development of the Lean steps so that the professionals themselves realize where the inefficiencies are. And from there, everything is about growing and building’.

Meanwhile, Fernando Franco added that before starting the Lean transformation it is important to differentiate between distributing funding and that each entity organizes itself to improve the delivery of services.

With regard to his experience in the University Complex of Salamanca, he said that within the Primary Care area there was unease and requests for resources and staff. This is where the plan to strengthen primary care appeared so that each team could decide where resources would be used with the aim of completely transforming the service’.

“Lean is a tool that helps us to analyse, ask ourselves what we are doing and make decisions”.

According to Franco, Lean is the forum and the tool in which we can raise problems and discuss them among all the actors. To achieve this, the figure of the engineer is fundamental.

Anna Ochoa, as a strategic consultant in healthcare, worked side by side in the transformation of the management of Vall d’Hebron Hospital.

“In the surgical process, everything was going great when we took measurements and we were on top of the process, but as soon as we moved a little further away, the indicators fell again. In order to consolidate the improvement and ensure that the ratios did not fall, we decided to incorporate MYSPHERA technology into the process”.

On the other hand, Salvador Vera shared his vision regarding technology and its role in the Lean transformation process.

“It is an enabler and not a tool in itself. You have to think about the adherence of the developed solution”.

“If the data is not recorded at the moment it occurs in the process, it will be wrong and will not improve”.

In this sense, with respect to the Vall d’Hebron process, Vera explained that ‘the visualization of the process is the first big step towards the management of the processes themselves’.

“So we came to Vall d’Hebron, we saw the post-its and they asked us to transfer it to the system. And that’s what we do: coordinate the tasks with what our solution knows how to do automatically”.

“Efficiency has been demonstrated in this area with improvements in the surgical process, with, for example, an increase of more than 16% in the number of operations at Vall d’Hebron”.