secretaries to concentrate themselves on a specific job
such as classification work, the telephone or the reception
of patients, while after 2 h they were forced to switch
jobs. As a result, secretaries got more motivated (different
jobs) and could better organize their work. In that way,
processing times of the activities and thus costs decreased
significantly. A second reason was the univocal classification
system and the more adequate accommodation the
secretaries could count on. The waiting times for telephone
services were, due to a more adequate accommodation
(for example, secretaries could use head-sets to telephone),
lower at the centralized departments. To solve the
issues above, healthcare managers and department heads
decided to centralize the secretariats for Gastroenterology
and Urology, introduce an internal rotation system and
put head-sets available for all secretaries to improve the
telephone accessibility and reduce telephone times.
The clinic’s management also felt that typing letters at
the Gastroenterology department took too long. To tackle
this problem, the Urology department head argued to use a
voice recognition system. As she said: “Using a voice recognition
system makes life so much easier. As we all need to write
down a lot of patient’s information, a voice recognition system
will significantly lower the time to reconstruct the patient’s
story including his treatment. At the Urology department the
introduction of these voice recording tools decreased standard
times for typing a letter drastically.” [Outpatient clinic,
Urology department head]