Carrying out independent surveys in hospitals - MEDIGREIF group uses EvaSys Healthcare Suite

The MEDIGREIF company is part of a group in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany with headquarters in Greifswald, Germany.

Since its founding in 1990, the association has grown steadily and currently comprises of 23 companies with 1,845 employees. The central focus of the company includes four hospitals in Saxony-Anhalt, three of which are general hospitals and a further and five rehabilitaton centers in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern as well various health & social care centres.

The surveys for all nine locations are centrally ran from the MEDIGREIF headquarters using EvaSys Healthcare.

“Lots of work and relatively unsatisfactory benefits” - was the observation of patient surveys that made the MEDIGREIF group search for a better solution for carrying out their surveys. Inhouse patients were surveyed at irregual intervals in the five hospitals and four rehabilitation clinics of the group.

The manual transfer of the completed surveys to Excel was very expensive and the resulting reports lacked standardisation. The results were shown with different diagram types for each organisation and each survey. This made it difficult to read and a comparison between the institutions was impossible. The inevitable errors made through manual data entry and the mountains of paper surveys, which they wanted to keep, further contributed to the overall disatisfaction.

What was needed was a a low-cost solution to carry out continous and ad-hoc surveys to achieve a standardised structure and evaluation. The MEDIGREIF group felt that even the layout and design of the surveys should be uniform.

MEDIGREIF never considered outsourcing. Expertise should be retained within the company, there were also concerns regarding handing out sensitive data. Therfore they decided to look for a suitable IT tool for carrying out internal surveys. The IT management did some research and discovered the EvaSys Healthcare survey solution.

The presentation of the software which was tailored to hospital survey needs achieved immediate enthusiasm. A trial run was carried out effortlessly, so the system was purchased in June 2007. The survey platform provides a framework for a uniform, standardised survey implementation and structures the entire process.

Stefan Sens, Quality Manager of the Saxony-Anhalt location, controls the implementation of the surveys centrally. In Q4 of 2007 a company-wide employee survey was carried out as well as a cross-institution patient survey.

The Quality Manager creates the surveys in the EvaSys WebEditor himself. Since the survey content was quite extensive, they decided to print A3 sheets which could be separated by a perforation line to allow for easy scanning. This system has proven highly successful.

Since then continous enterprise-wide surveys have been carried out. The surveys can be quickly scanned and are therefore available in the system as an interim report at any time. This is achieved in a matter of minutes. In addition to emergency reports, the data can be selected through user-defined priorities to be exported to Excel or other programmes for management. 

Mr Sens concludes: “By using EvaSys we get our work done much quicker. Without having measured it, I would say the analysis of a survey which was previously done in three days has now been reduced to half a day.”  Following a year of practical use, it can be said that EvaSys has fulfilled all the group‘s expectations.

Mr Sens also praised the support team, “It‘s wonderful to just shout for help and have support come to your aid in such a rapid and competent manner. Especially in the early days, this was greatly reassuring. Further impetus is obtained at regular intervals during the webinars that Electric Paper offers. In additon to professional training, exchanges with other users are also of great importance.”

System introduction: June 2007
Software: EvaSys Healthcare
Number of returned & evaluated surveys per year: approximately 55,000