Post-acquisition: Securing the hospitals future through investing as a means of choice

• Hospital take-overs will make sense only if the aggregate of a location’s potential on the one side and our know-how and financing power on the other side is more than what was there before. And only then will the new symbiosis be successful in competing with other players and in serving its market over the long term.
  
• Such purpose-directed symbiosis, aimed at maximising the opportunities ahead, requires a clear agenda and constructive discussion. To this end, we establish special project groups that are headed by experienced Group employees. These dedicated teams will take up the findings of our initial review to work out and propose a development plan on this basis. Following this, all parties concerned will table their ideas and specific interests as well as possible reservations or doubts. We will then try to come to a “consensus for thought”, which is indispensable if we are to arrive at a viable model that will enjoy the support of all. This process will not tolerate any barriers for thought (in the sense of “Don’t touch this subject …”) nor enforce over-hasty consent. It’s driven by the expertise of professionals who we know are very well capable of defining very clearly what will best serve the interests of all in the long run; proof of this is our track record in successfully turning around newly acquired hospitals. In the process, the team members usually agree from the start that patients’ well-being and high-quality care for all should be given top priority – in fact, this has always been the easiest exercise, followed at best by a discussion on what patients’ well-being really means. It’s common practice at RHÖN-KLINIKUM that our project groups act in close co-operation with employees’ councils who play an important part in the ever recurring weighing of common interests against individual interests, a function whose value we recognise.
  
• To optimise the quality of nursing care and treatments at its hospitals, RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG has developed a future-oriented operating concept that changes the hospital’s process paradigm. At the heart of this concept is stringent patient and process orientation, which we achieve by applying the flow principle (= process-oriented workflow organisation).
  
• The core characteristics of this flow principle as applied in our hospitals are: a centralised multidisciplinary diagnostic unit at the preliminary stage of hospitalisation; a four-level nursing and treating concept, ranging from intensive and intermediate to normal and low care, including day care., An example is our Wiesbaden-based Deutsche Klinik für Diagnostik who probably runs the largest day clinic in Germany, with close to 12,000 day-case patients per year.
  
• Experience shows that newly acquired hospitals can usually not be operated profitably in their “old” buildings – at least not over the long run – as unfavourable architectural structures do not lend themselves to our patient-oriented process flow concept. In most cases, the implementation of optimised and cost-efficient procedures will require replacement of old facilities by new hospital buildings that are tailored to work flows from the very start: architectural and organisational structures are designed such as to allow efficient clinical processes by reducing distances and eliminating unnecessary steps or bottlenecks. When planning for a new building, we take due account of the respective hospital’s actual capacity utilisation rates and performance data (case numbers, duration of stays in hospital, nursing days, treatments performed/case mix and case mix indices = service spectre reflected in DRGs) as well as the number of beds occupied on average. These data will then be factored into a master concept which to develop is the responsibility of a multidisciplinary project group. By stringently realising the described architectural and equipping concept in combination with our multi-level care and workflow concept, we achieve substantial cost optimisations that are normally vital for the respective hospital’s continued success. 
    

• The patient in focus
• High-level investing
• Investing in innovation