Medical Care and Nursing

The Medical Board – intermediary between medicine and economic efficiency

From the very beginning, RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG has assumed a unique pioneering role on the German hospital market. With our Medical Board we remain faithful to this tradition. In this body of experts, proven top physicians work on an interfacility and interdisciplinary basis together with their colleagues at the hospitals to ensure that our patients specifically benefit from the medical expertise of RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG. Working throughout the Group, they deal above all with issues relating to the medical strategy of the Group and its individual facilities as well as their compliance with corporate objectives.

The focus of work is on the conception and implementation of key medical innovations promoted in numerous projects. For example, in a Company-internal research and innovation programme, 61 projects with a total volume of roughly four million euros were launched in the first funding round. They primarily deal with the subjects of “Research and Innovation” as well as “Treatment Excellence and Network Medicine”. This research and innovation programme covers projects at all of the Group’s five sites and is the result of a Group-wide competition. 

The second tender round for the funding pool was initiated in the autumn of 2015. The focus here is on simulation tools for funding patient safety and on new approaches in personalised medicine.

Network medicine

One strategic goal of RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG is implementing the entrepreneurial and health-policy vision of national full-service networked medical care. In future, each patient is to continue to receive the best possible, high-quality medical care tailored to his needs – in keeping with our guiding principle of rationalisation before rationing: efficiency reserves are to be reaped while preserving a level of medical care at least equivalent in quality. This is to be achieved by targeted referral of patients – also beyond regional borders – to the place and type of treatment. In this way, patient care can be optimised and at the same time waste of resources prevented. 

As the first step towards actually achieving network medicine, an operator-open networking partnership promoted under the brand “Wir für Gesundheit” (We stand for health) took up its work in 2014. Together with our partners, we offer under this framework to all insured patients under an employer-financed supplementary insurance scheme a guaranteed quality level as well as additional outpatient and inpatient healthcare services at the facilities of the partner network. It is rounded off by further comfort services, making the difference between private and statutory insurance coverage hardly perceptible anymore for patients. This is accompanied by the introduction of networking medical structures enabling more specific and individualised treatment of patients within the network and the networked hospitals. In the medium term, the network is to be expanded into a national, operator-open network of qualified providers. 

With the networked medical care at our site, we are committing ourselves to cross-sector and cross-facility regional cooperation of service providers on the one hand and to the use and ongoing development of telemedicine on the other. For example, the neurology facility Neurologische Klinik in Bad Neustadt is steadily expanding its activities further to include cross-sector care.