Muscat Private Hospital- Oman bags two awards at the Healthcare Asia Awards 2018

The hospital won the Patient Safety Initiative of the Year and the ICT Initiative of the Year.

Muscat Private Hospital, managed by the UME Group, is Oman's premier private medical facility. Located in the heart of Muscat, in the scenic area of Bausher, the hospital is a tertiary care hospital, with world-class out-patient and in-patient facilities. It provides comprehensive care in all major specialties and offers full range of service including 24-hours Emergency Room, a Diagnostic Centre with low-dose C.T. Scan with cardiac capability and the latest MRI. Muscat Private Hospital's medical team is capable of managing the full range of patient care. With highly qualified and experienced international staff, compassionate and responsive staff members, and highly trained clinicians, the hospital seeks to ensure that investigations and treatments consistently deliver the best medical services while patients enjoy the level of comfort, ambience and customer service of a hotel. 

Muscat Private Hospital is the first hospital in Oman in both the government and private sectors to be awarded with the Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation. It was initially accredited in January 2012, reaccredited in January 2015, and have recently passed the reaccreditation in March 2018. In 2017, the transition between the 5th editions of JCI hospital standards to the 6th edition was met with enthusiasm by the Quality and International Patient Safety Goals (IPSG) team. Review and revision of the protocols, policies and procedures as well as system processes were conducted, initiated, and implemented.

Through that transition period, a patient safety initiative was launched with the IPSG as the foundation of its standards. The patient safety initiative measures were implemented and strengthened to prevent patient identification errors, improve effective communication by limiting verbal or telephone orders, improve the safety of high alert medications and concentrated electrolytes by clearly defining the storage, handling, and using the tall man letters to separate Look Alike and Sound Alike medication. The patient safety initiative also ensured safe surgery by following the time out/sign out procedure, surgical site marking, within and outside the theater, reduced the risk of health care associated infection by actively promoting hand hygiene both to hospital staff, patient and their families, and other hospital visitors, and reduced the risk of patient harm resulting from falls by following the falls protocol in the inpatient, outpatient and ambulatory units for adults and paediatric patients.

In 2017, there were no reportable sentinel events or any serious and adverse related drug events, no adverse events in procedural sedation/anesthesia, no major discrepancy between pre and post-operative diagnosis, no serious physical injury have resulted from patient falls, and no infectious disease or hospital acquired infection outbreaks thus making the overall success of the patient safety initiative program all the more commendable. This has also led to an increase in customer satisfaction. The improvement in customer satisfaction has translated to 98% of patients stating that they felt safe while they were in Muscat Private Hospital compared to the 90% rate last 2016.

Th Muscat Private Hospital also built a future-proof, smart, consolidated datacenter (DC) in 2017 to support its operations and enhance the service levels across the value chain of the hospital. Its ICT department evaluated several technologies and solutions and finally decided to build the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) which is based on the software-defined datacenter concept. HCI manages all four components of DC — Compute, Network, Security, and Storage — from a single software. The proposed system not only reduces the cost of operation but also enhances the data transfer speed, security, and network resilience, which results in fast, accurate, and reliable services to the patients, providers, and the payers. In the first three months of operation, the new HCI has shown a significant reduction in the cost of operation by 69% with an estimated annual saving of $45,000. In addition, the expected savings in the human resources is about $24,000 per year.

These initiatives has won Muscat Private Hospital the Patient Safety Initiative of the Year and the ICT Initiative of the Year.

The Healthcare Asia Awards 2018 was held on 23 May 2018 at the Conrad Centennial Singapore.

This year's nominations were judged by a panel consisting of Abhay Bangi, Partner, Life Sciences & Healthcare Lead, Ernst & Young; Mohit Grover, Life Sciences & Healthcare Leader, Deloitte, and; Sabrina Tay, Partner and Deputy Industry Lead, Healthcare RSM Singapore.

Check out the event photos during the awards night here.

If you would like to join the 2019 awards and be awarded as one of the most outstanding healthcare companies in the region, please email Marianne at [email protected].