St Vincent’s Private Hospital

Over the last decade, St Vincent’s Private Hospital has punched well above its weight when it comes to patient volume, as well as the range of treatments it offers. With a view to ensuring demand never outstripped capacity, St Vincent’s Private Hospital recognised the need to rationalise it’s storage, increasing space and capacity for expansion of operating theatres and private appointment spaces.

When it comes to Automated Storage Systems (AS/RS), Industore encourage potential clients to visit similar sites – to see real-world examples of our application and benefits. Trevor Elliott, Industore Sales Director explains:

Inviting potential clients to existing sites is an opportunity for them to experience applications in use, and critically gives them the opportunity to hear from the people using the machines daily. After a visit to the BreastCheck Clinic, adjacent to the University Hospital, St Vincent’s Private Hospital staff quickly recognised the benefits and space rationalisation the clinic benefitted from – and better understood how they could apply a similar application to resolve their space needs, with our Hänel Rotomat.

The medical records department was initially allocated two small spaces across multiple levels, which were accessed via a staircase or multi-story shared lift. Needing reliable, fast and accurate storage and retrieval to a high volume of sensitive patient documents, St Vincent’s Private Hospital were keen to involve Industore in the architectural planning stages of the building, to ensure ultimate efficiency through cleverly designed space saving solutions.

A total of four, seven-meter tall Hänel Rotomat Systems, spanning two-floors were commissioned in early 2010. It was established that the retrieval points would be best situated near the top of the machines on the first basement level, as this was set to be transformed into a workstation for administration staff in the Medical Records department. This space was defined because as patient files are delivered, it’s vital that all confidential and personal information is retrieved, reviewed and stored in the shortest time possible. Using the new layout and the Rotomat system designed by Industore, this is circa 30 seconds. Comprised of 39 carriers in each machine, the vertical contain 452 linear meters of useable storage space. To top that into perspective, that’s equitant to an Olympic running track.

St Vincent’s Private hospital opted to keep their own ERP systems to organise medical records, to keep a sense of continuity for staff. As a result, next to no training was required, due to the fact that Rotomats are so intuitive. Today, each carrier in the carousel contains an estimated 580 records and file accuracy has increased ten-fold. Furthermore, human made errors have been completely eliminated and – at capacity, 60,000 files could be stored in the Rotomats – futureproofing the hospital for increased storage requirements to the future.