At hospitals, we offer gases and service solutions that take into account the needs of all medical professionals, while optimizing costs.
Air Liquide has a major presence in hospitals with medical gases and related services. Accordingly, how can Value-Based Healthcare be adapted to healthcare institutions?
Value-Based Healthcare is a unique approach that encourages all stakeholders to jointly re-examine the benefits for patients and to be involved in the transformation of healthcare systems. We work in partnership with each stakeholder in the healthcare pathway (hospitals, urban medicine and emergency services) to help medical professionals concentrate on tasks with greater added value for patients, while securing the availability of the medical gases they need on a daily basis.
What does that mean specifically?
Today we are only in the early stages of using the Value-Based Healthcare approach to benefit hospitals. But we already have solutions in place that ease the work of caregivers and optimize costs for hospitals. Besides supplying medical gases, we offer services that account for all hospital needs. One example of this is Total Gas Management, which enables everything in the gas logistics process to be managed on the hospital site. Another example is our new line of cylinders for medical oxygen that facilitates the administration of medical oxygen, patient mobility and inventory management for hospital caregivers, who have been in extremely high demand during the pandemic.
Hospitals face a great many challenges. How are you responding to them?
All hospitals do indeed face sizable challenges: accommodating patients in greater and greater numbers, lowering costs without affecting quality of care and participating in regional care networks, all while remaining a hospital of choice. We are adapting to these challenges by redesigning our operational models. As an example, we want to offer a comprehensive care package per patient treated, rather than per products and services supply. Such a model lets us offer optimal quality of care to the benefit of the patient, the healthcare professionals and the healthcare system as a whole.