Coordination centre at Citadelle Hospital of Liège

From quick-scan recommendations to global vision and ambitions

Early 2021, Airport Intelligence had been chosen to perform a maturity assessment on the readiness of the Citadelle Hospital of Liege to go from its actual organization to a collaborative way of working by means of an operational coordination centre.  A few months later, the collaboration was continued with the ambition to transform the idea of implementing a coordination centre focused on the patient journey into an actual plan.

While the “quick scan” gave  good insights into the current status and maturity of the hospital, the first step of this  project was to retake the concept with all impacted stakeholders during a number of workshops to align on vision and ambitions, responding to questions such as:

• What would be the perfect coordination centre for our organisation?
• How will the coordination centre help the organisation reach its goals?
• Which pains and needs should be answered by the set-up of a coordination centre? 
• How will the coordination centre fit into our organisation? 
• …

The focus of these workshops was to create a common vision and ambitions, that was realised through focussed co-creation sessions, where the different stakeholders transversally had to work together and come to a joint vision. This already mimicked the future collaborative way of working of the coordination centre. In this way,  awareness (of the need and the bottlenecks of others) was created and the desire for the transition was nurtured. All of them are crucial steps in a change management process.

Different work packages, one final objective

While aligning on vision and ambitions, priorities and work packages were identified and mapped on a manageable roadmap, aiming to implement a coordination centre focused on the patient journey in 6 months, including:

• The setup of governance, structure and organisation of the coordination centre, within the hospital;
• Communication means and tools to optimize the coordination centre organisation;
• New organisation and way of working for the involved stakeholders, focused on (newly identified) key milestones from the patient journey, and containing post-OPS analysis;
• Online and shared dashboards on hospital services follow-up and hospital status to support collaborative decision making based on one single version of the truth;
• Strategical indicators of performance to monitor (follow and quantify) the impact of the coordination centre.

A journey through change and communication management

Before integrating new tools and data, implementing a coordination centre is first and foremost about change, it is about gathering people in one and same place while developing a new way of collaborating.  It  requires people to alter their way of working, an evolution that must be supported through smooth transition phases, right supporting assets, and visible gains:

• Set up the right environment: we brought people together and made them talk/collaborate, set up the room in the best way to ease and promote interactions, creating a pleasant environment and great atmosphere;
• Optimise way of working: we started from existing processes, procedures, roles, functions and tools, this is key, though an iterative process has been established to ensure continuous improvement based on learnings and experience;
• Agile way of working: we ensured fast delivery and changes, made sure we went in the right direction and brought functional quick wins to motivate end-users;
• Co-creation: we ensured all partners were bringing their knowledge while creating project awareness to facilitate the transition, helping stakeholders to learn from each other as soon as day one, and adapting ways of working to nurture the “one common goal” mindset.

Alongside, a stakeholder management plan has been developed and implemented. A communication plan has been outlined together with the communications department, including inauguration day, video, articles... These elements were essential to support the coordination centre’s success, whose efficiency depends on others’ awareness and willingness to share information and involve them.

List of deliverables & next steps

Beyond the implementation of a coordination centre, our collaboration resulted in a report integrating a synthesis of our journey and a set of recommendations for the way forward:

• High-level roadmap for the implementation of the recommended next phases of the coordination centre, to make a step from reactive to pro-active management with forecasting and improved planning;
• Definition of the “Hospital Operations Plan”: the tool that will support the evolution of the coordination centre;

The needs in terms of infrastructure & IT to support the evolution of the coordination centre