The economic aspects in our health system have reached a point where paradigms are shifting: what had initially been a day-based flat hospital rate, became a tightly-supervised maximum budget and finally developed into process-oriented patient control which secures financing for hospital services with the assistance of Diagnosis Related Groups (German-DRG).

Economy in the health system means to stick to the set principles for financing of hospitals and university hospitals, but it also means to achieve a reasonable use of funds for operating costs. Owing to dual financing, the health system has been able to generate additional funds which can now be freed under DRG financing. In order to do that, new medical-economic control systems must be implemented to help streamline inefficient organizational processes into a sensible process design. Pathways describe the clinical service process, determine the cost components that can then be allotted to certain parts of the pathway and control the medical-economic process of diagnostics and therapy.
We analyse the complex processes in hospitals and university hospitals. Then we transform these processes in such a way that instead of clinical structures (wards, disciplines, hospitals) the patient is the centre of attention. By this means the necessary processes in diagnostics and therapy will be investigated from a planning, quality-ensuring and economical point of view. Patient-oriented interdisciplinary process organization is the core of medical-economic control.

Standard Operating Procedures will in the long run initiate a movement towards quality management; they will show the patient easily and clearly the individual course of his or her illness; they improve communication and interfaces between different types of hospital service (medical service, nursing service, functional service, medical-technical service); they promote an awareness of team spirit and interdisciplinarity.
Medicine and economic issues use StOP® as their moderator that takes care of directing resources to where they are most useful. StOP® enables processes to be designed according to hospital's needs; unnecessary procedures, services and redundancies are filtered in a way that costs will decrease and the quality of diagnostics and therapy increase at the same time.
A health system attracts many market players to join in. The pharmaceutical industry, manufacturers of medical devices and many other spheres of interest meet in the complex daily business of managing medical processes. Every seller of goods and services, almost all occupational groups in a hospital and a variety of participants in the everyday routine of a clinic have interests of their own. This produces a mass of unnecessary activities that can be avoided. Improved quality and reduced costs are the consequences of this kind of modern process management in hospitals and university hospitals and will contribute to a secure future for medical facilities in the age of DRG.

Nearly all medical and nursing decisions are mirrored in the type of costs of medical supply they cause. Everyday medical practice leaves its mark on medical essentials; we assist doctors and nurses with identifying the necessary processes (of change). In this respect the MES®-procedure is a quality-ensuring element in the clinical processes, causing a reduction of the number of cost-creating factors. Medical supply is therefore an indicator of process changes in medicine. Medical supplies in our responsibility reach approx. € 650 Mio. p.a. This represents approximately 6.5% of medical supplies used in hospitals and university clinics in Germany; in university clinics alone Lohfert & Lohfert AG handles 30% of medical supplies.

Assigning the ’right‘ staff to the various medical service areas has turned out to be a ’never ending story‘. With the application of the method for analytical clinic staffing (MAPEK) the appropriate use of hospital personnel is defined by considering performance-oriented parameters whereby size and function of the facility, minimum staffing issues, standards set by law (regulation on working hours) and other factors are being adequately allowed for. By using the MAPEK process we can simulate in which way a change of structures or services will influence certain staffing requirements. That way, the economic effect of (DRG-oriented) changes of service can be forecasted.

In order to simplify communication, Lohfert & Lohfert AG has developed a system called Medical Private Network (MPN) with the assistance of which medical-economic control data can be directly made available to hospitals. The most modern computer-controlled methods make sure that data transfer will happen in a secure and coordinated manner; time-critical control parameters can give the responsible functions on-time information on whether changes may be advisable. Bottleneck-oriented, the selection of parameters follows the principle of essentiality. We set up moderated forums which allow all participating hospitals to discuss issues concerning processes, structures and outcome.