ENGIE: Improving Patient Flow and Porterage in a Hospital Setting

How porter software increases hospital efficiency.

Porters are the heartbeat of hospitals, making sure crucial goods and items are delivered where they are needed most. These facilities staff also make sure patients are at the right place at the right time to get the treatment they need. Porterage in a hospital setting ranges from transporting patients on trolleys or in wheelchairs to handling waste and changing of gas cylinders. ENGIE, a leading provider of service-led activities in the U.K., relies on Portertrac from TEAM Software to automate their complex porter management. The result? Improved patient flow, effective job allocation and delivering against hospital KPIs.

Supporting the patient experience with porterage in a hospital setting.

Before implementing porter management software, ENGIE managed porterage tasks through a series of manual processes. Outdated pen-and paper processes could not scale and continue to support the growing demands of today’s modern hospital.

“The Trust monitors us, so we have to meet targets. There’s a need for us to prove the quality of the job we’re doing,” said Lee Wiltshire, ENGIE Facilities General Manager. “[Portertrac] software shows our clients at the hospital, and the Trust, a detailed look at our tasks and how we’re accomplishing them. We’ve established a very good relationship with our client as a result.”

An advantage of the Portertrac system includes its intuitive design and ease of use. The software uses a three-pillar approach that focuses on the control desk, dispatch and self-service portal. Porter managers can effortlessly create tasks on demand, regardless of if they are one-off, scheduled or recurring. For increased performance, the task activation happens with a single click or swipe.

How can hospitals increase efficiency?

Portertrac uses leading technology to suggest appropriate porters for a job, but it doesn’t rely entirely on automation. Portertrac ensures porter managers can override software suggestions to authorise tasks. That way, tasks evaluation occurs on a case-by-case basis leading to increased efficiencies without incurring additional overheads. Portertrac helps remove human error, improves turnaround between jobs, which in turn reduces patient waiting time and stress. By enabling the teams of porters to improve their performance this leads to a better patient experience and outcomes across the hospital.

“Without Portertrac on this site, patient flow would be severely hampered, causing problems within the healthcare environment,” said Stuart Burnham, ENGIE performance improvement manager.

Porters in health care.

Patient flow, patient experience and patient safety is of the utmost importance to hospitals. By enhancing porterage in a hospital setting, you can reduce the time patients and care staff are waiting on lab results, equipment movement, personal effect transport or other tasks. The result? An improvement of the whole care environment for patients as well as Trust staff.

Successful porterage isn’t limited to only the successful completion of tasks. Portertrac identifies task urgency, skills required and analyses them based on routine or urgent needs. As a result, ENGIE can prioritise tasks at a glance and assign porters based on their current tasks or workloads, and their proximity — both current and future locations, based on Portertrac predictive features.

“The reporting functionality and the alterability we have in the system is great,” said Stuart Burnham. “We’re able to review areas of use, which then helps inform any sort of target operating model that we want to review and then react to with our client.” ENGIE is using Portertrac to analyse hospital porter shift patterns. This results in informed staffing decisions, optimal dispatch and KPI achievement.

“It ticks so many boxes and makes it able for us deliver our services. We keep our customers happy, both in the clinical staff and in the wards. And, we are able to meet our KPIs,” said Lee Wiltshire. “Portertrac is absolutely vital.”