Patients

Holistic healthcare

Our healthcare facilities and services are integrated to a degree that enables us to provide our patients with comprehensive inpatient and outpatient care. In our Centres of Excellence, we specialise in the treatment of specific symptoms. To provide the best possible treatment, we increasingly integrate digital solutions such as the Asklepios Online Clinic.

From prevention to rehabilitation

As part of its commitment to holistic healthcare, Asklepios provides a comprehensive treatment infrastructure for patients that offers support throughout the treatment process – from prevention and outpatient treatment all the way to inpatient treatment and rehabilitation. We provide basic, standard, maximum and priority care and participate in prevention and educational projects aimed at promoting general health in line with the precautionary principle. Our patients can avail themselves of a range of services including outpatient support at our medical centres.

In our hospitals and specialist clinics, we use established specialities to cater for all care levels of inpatient treatment. We have defined a total of 39 departments as Centres of Excellence. They stand out thanks to special features such as the large numbers of patients with specific diseases as well as an infrastructure adapted to particular symptoms. Thanks to multi-professional treatment teams, targeted care delivery using remedies and aids as well as the comprehensive rehabilitation services for our patients as part of their medically prescribed treatments, we endeavour to achieve the best possible treatment outcomes at our Centres of Excellence.

Optimised processes and digital services

In deploying digital solutions, we cooperate with partners from the healthcare sector. Together with Minddistrict, for example, we developed the Asklepios Online Clinic. This offers digital therapy programmes for people with mental health problems, which are combined with video calls and personal contact.

To ensure that we can guarantee the best possible treatment to our patients in the future as well, the hospitals in Hamburg use the Meierhofer M-KIS hospital information system, while all acute care hospitals and specialist clinics outside Hamburg use the Dedalus Orbis system. These hospitals were moved onto these two KIS platforms over the past few years using what is known as the blueprint method. The blueprint guarantees uniform, optimised digital processes, meaning that the treatment process can be documented transparently in the digital patient record.

In addition, we are making increasing use of digital communication formats for prevention. In the health podcast “Die digitale Sprechstunde” (The Digital Consultation) jointly issued by German daily newspaper “Hamburger Abendblatt” and Hamburg’s Asklepios hospitals, doctors explain one medical topic or symptom in each episode and provide tips on prevention.

Health offers for companies

With our “Corporate Health” business segment, we help companies to boost the productivity and health of their employees. In cooperation with our subsidiaries the Fürstenberg Institute, INSITE-Interventions and Pulso Europe, we offer counselling programmes such as the Employee Assistant Programme (EAP), various work-life services, health coaching and medical check-ups. Our own employees can also use these programmes.

Guaranteeing patient safety

Top medical quality and safety are essential prerequisites to enable us to provide the best possible care for our patients. We understand that guaranteeing both in the long term is an ongoing process. In so doing, we consider not only our employees, but also our patients as vital sources of feedback.

To ensure high-quality patient care at all Asklepios hospitals, we use comprehensive quality management. The core component is the established programme for patient safety, which includes methods, tools and standards that allow us to detect clinical risks early on and to analyse and avoid them. A clinical risk includes everything that may endanger the safety of patients during their treatment.

Based on risk analyses and in the recommendations of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the German Coalition for Patient Safety, we have developed appropriate standards and derived recommended actions and prevention measures. These include an operation safety checklist in accordance with the WHO, counting checks during surgery as well as patient identification armbands in all hospitals. The “Stop-Inject: Check!” method helps us avoid medication errors during intravenous injections.

Quality management system developed further

All Asklepios hospitals have a structured quality management system in place, which is continuously developed and adapted to current legal requirements. This system conforms to the legally required QM tools in accordance with the QM guidelines set out by the Federal Joint Committee and to the standards the Group has outlined for improving patient safety.

Internal audits improve patient care

The Group Quality division defines the specific requirements that apply as minimum standards for all hospitals. Internal quality and risk managers at the hospitals are responsible for their implementation. To ensure exceptional standards of medical, nursing and therapeutic patient care, all Asklepios hospitals are audited each year by the Group Quality division. In addition to this, the Asklepios audit programme includes internal hospital audits and risk audits on priority issues.

The measures for improvement that were derived in 2022 are also in effect in 2023. Further measures for improvement were derived from the audits in 2023, for example:

• Process optimisations for safe handling of anaesthetics
• Improvement of processes for medical emergency management
• Measures to ensure compliance with hygiene standards
• Implementation of processes for handling patients’ property

A controlling process has been established to ensure the implementation of the quality requirements arising from the Federal Joint Committee’s quality management guidelines. The Group Quality division also requires all hospitals to provide an action plan resulting from the annual audits that documents the derived improvement process. In 2024, the Group Quality division will introduce effectiveness checks for the improvement process, firstly to monitor the implementation of the derived actions and secondly to check whether the actions are achieving the intended effect.

Patient safety as a key CR goal

Responsibility for our patients is the top priority for all Group divisions – including the Group ESG division. As part of the materiality analysis, we have defined patient safety as a key CR topic. The central goal of guaranteeing consistently excellent patient safety is now firmly anchored in our CR roadmap. To improve our ability to track progress, our KPI set also includes key figures for the Critical Incident Reporting System (CIRS) as well as the “Sicher Arbeiten Vertrauen Erhalten” (S.A.V.E.) prevention format.

CIRS reporting system: Learning from mistakes

The Critical Incident Reporting System (CIRS) is a key component of our clinical risk management. With the help of CIRS, all employees can submit anonymous reports of mistakes and undesirable events in the clinical process. The system enables cross-departmental and inter-hospital learning from mistakes by passing on cases of general relevance along with specific prevention recommendations to all Asklepios hospitals.

Since 2010, more than 16,400 reports have been submitted, from which over 12,400 measures for improvement have been derived. These include measures to prevent medications that look similar from being mixed up, improvements to emergency equipment on wards as well as measures to prevent the incorrect use of equipment. In the 2023 financial year, our employees submitted 807 reports via CIRS and 440 measures were implemented. We combine the CIRS key figures already developed in a process-oriented key figure. When interpreting this, it should be noted that generally one key figure alone – such as the number of reports – is not informative, but rather only an assessment of all relevant results for the process.

In the event of a medical claim, the Group Quality division conducts an intensive investigation. Systemic case analyses are conducted with the employees involved in order to identify errors and their contributory factors as well as to implement targeted measures to prevent recurrence.

S.A.V.E. prevention format

Obstetric emergencies are rare but highly dramatic events. Decisions have to be made extremely quickly and implemented under great stress and time pressure. In such emergency situations, it is crucial for the interdisciplinary team of gynaecologists, midwives and male midwives, anaesthesiologists, neonatologists and nurses to work together hand in hand.

Asklepios established the medical law format “S.A.V.E. Sicher Arbeiten Vertrauen Erhalten” (Work Safely, Gain Trust) in 2017 with the aim of ensuring that all employees working in delivery rooms are optimally prepared for emergency situations during childbirth. In 2020, this training was rolled out to the company’s central emergency departments.

The basic principle behind S.A.V.E. is to take a structured approach to the extensive information on medical claims and their causes provided by liability cases. This is done by way of a targeted combination of emergency training and legal workshops.

The training is provided at the Institute for Emergency Medicine in Hamburg and at the Asklepios hospitals across Germany. In addition to medical content, the S.A.V.E. skills training held centrally also focuses on teaching manual skills, legal aspects relating to information and documentation, and the requirements for safe and effective communication in emergency situations. In the S.A.V.E. team training sessions, simulation-based stress tests tailored to the requirements of the respective department are carried out on site at the hospitals. These training sessions are held in real treatment rooms with real teams. The goal is for everybody involved from all disciplines and professions to work in perfect coordination in an emergency.

S.A.V.E. relies on networking, promotes dialogue between professional groups and locations, supports the optimisation of emergency structures and standards, raises teams’ awareness of legal issues and ensures safety for patients and employees at the Asklepios hospitals. The S.A.V.E. format comes under the responsibility of the Group Medical Law, Insurance and Compliance division, which conducts all training courses in cooperation with the Institute for Emergency Medicine.

Hours of training in delivery rooms and central emergency departments

We measure the success of the birth defect prevention format (S.A.V.E.) based on the number of birth defects with a medium or high liability risk in relation to the number of births (rolling three-year average). In the reporting year, this key figure was one in 4,415 births, based on the rolling three-year average for 2020 to 2022.

Strict hygiene regulations

Hygiene is a key element of patient safety. For this reason, our hospitals are bound by strict hygiene regulations. These include internal Group training measures for specialist hygiene personnel, involvement in surveillance surveys and participation in the “Clean Your Hands” initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO). The implementation of these standards is monitored in conjunction with quality management by means of internal and external audits.

Protecting patient data – analogue and digital

We also care for our patients in the digital domain. Our focus here is on protecting sensitive patient data. For this reason, digitalisation in our hospitals is closely monitored in terms of data protection. In this context, we create structures that allow data to be processed for the intended purpose in a secure environment, thereby increasing the level of data protection. We use a range of security standards to guarantee integrity, confidentiality and a high level of overall security:

• As part of a data protection management system, we monitor the implementation of data protection requirements. The management teams at the individual hospitals are responsible for implementing data protection. They are supported at operational level by the local data protection officers at the hospitals and Group companies, assisted in some cases by local data protection coordinators. The Group Legal division acts as the central point of contact for advice regarding data protection.
• A series of procedural instructions create binding instructions on the handling of data in the company. They specify, for instance, that patient data can be processed only with the patient’s consent, if processing is necessary to comply with applicable laws and regulations, or if another legal basis for this exists. We have agreed uniform standards throughout the company for evaluating risks during processing operations. If risks are identified, a binding catalogue of measures including specific timelines for the implementation of improvement measures is defined. We inform our employees about the security standards that apply to data processing in mandatory training courses that we hold at regular intervals.

Preventing privacy breaches

Despite high security standards, isolated privacy breaches can still occur. In 2023, we documented 65 cases of breaches in the protection of personal data that were also reported to the relevant supervisory authority. All cases were recorded and analysed. From all incidents, we derived measures and documented these internally at the hospitals to prevent any future recurrence. The hospital in question informs the authorities of the implementation of these measures.

Own data centre in Hamburg

To provide the necessary IT infrastructure, Asklepios operates its own data centre with around 4,100 virtualised servers in Hamburg-Barmbek. The data centre is certified to the data protection and data security standard ISO 27001, and also performs independent internal and external audit-penetration tests. To prevent data loss in the event of hardware malfunctions or failures, all data is stored redundantly and monitored by virus scanners and other security systems. Asklepios also adheres to the principle of minimality, which means that every user is issued only with the rights that they actually need.