Samsung Medical Center: IT Infrastructure Consulting

Samsung Medical Center (SMC), a subsidiary of Samsung Life and Insurance, is a leading provider of patient-centric health care in Korea and one of the country's best-known medical institutions.

SMC's existing IT infrastructure required analytical enhancements to provide more business insights and the hospital's clinical processes were coming under strain as it strove to serve increasing numbers of patients. SMC resolved to tackle these challenges by improving operational effectiveness, gradually extending innovations in clinical process to its non-clinical practice.

SMC wants to build on its reputation in Korea to become the leading hospital in Asia by 2010. The hospital's "Vision 2010" initiative calls for the construction of seven new specialty clinics, including an 800-bed cancer treatment center that will open in 2007. It also envisages dramatically improved teaching and research facilities, as well as the administrative infrastructure to sustain them.

SMC already enjoys a leading position as a patient-centric provider, but faces stiff competition from other Korean hospital groups. In order to sustain its competitive edge and fulfill its long-term ambitions, SMC recognized that it needed to completely upgrade not only its IT infrastructure, but also many of its clinical processes.

SMC chose Accenture to help realize this project because of our globally renowned capabilities in strategy, process and organization, IT and its ability to help clients achieve high performance. Unlike rival bidders, Accenture proposed a strategic, solution-based approach to SMC's challenge that was entirely focused on the hospital's needs.

Accenture brought in resources from our strategy, process and Global Technology Consulting divisions to implement the SMC information strategy planning and process innovation project. The project fell naturally into two parts.

The Planning phase involved diagnosing the hospital's current clinical and administrative practices and processes, as well as its IT infrastructure, in order to discover opportunities for improvement. Accenture applied our Business Integration Methodology, which combines a top-down approach to strategic intent with a bottom-up analysis of operational and infrastructure processes. This phase culminated in the production of a three-part master plan to deliver new, to-be processes, as well as IT solutions and a new IT infrastructure or architecture, which, unlike its predecessor, is focused on stabilization and disaster prevention.

The Implementation phase is ongoing and involves Accenture working with SMC toward the implementation of nine clinical process innovation solutions. These relate to order communication; admission and discharge; outpatient management; appointments and reservations; bed management; medical staff communications; clinician referrals; emergency room procedures; and laboratory test processes. Accenture has led workshops to help hospital staff understand the nature of root-cause problems and to enlist their help in proposing and delivering solutions, as well as introductory sessions designed to familiarize hospital staff with the new IT and business solutions. All these initiatives are interrelated.

Meanwhile, SMC and Accenture have adopted queuing theory and instituted a process simulation tool to optimize the efficiency of the hospital's current processes and resources.

With Accenture's help, SMC has developed a master plan for future changes in support of Vision 2010. The enhancement of the hospital's IT infrastructure is just one result of these initiatives. When completed, the proposed clinical process innovations will support operational excellence capabilities including a greatly improved order communication process.

Moreover, SMC will continue to adjust its strategy to ensure that it is fully focused on patients and their needs, developing distinctive capabilities through its new process and IT infrastructure and gradually transforming the behavior of hospital staff and the nature of the hospital's organizational culture to ensure performance that can sustain high performance in the future.