Dubai Health Authority - Support Department of the Year

Company: Dubai Health Authority
Company Description: Dubai’s Health Authority (DHA) is the local government entity established with the aim to provide an accessible, effective and integrated healthcare system, promote public health and improve the quality of life within the Emirate. The DHA's mission is to transform Dubai into a leading healthcare destination by fostering innovative and integrated care models and by enhancing community engagement.
Nomination Category: Support Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Support Department of the Year

Nomination Title: Corporate Quality and Excellence Department

Introduction

The Dubai Health Authority “DHA”, as a Dubai Government entity is mandated to regulate the public and private healthcare sector, medical insurance, medical education and research as well as provision of healthcare throughout Dubai.

DHA’s organizational structure comprises +65 business units, with +12,000 employees, and offers millions of patient transactions annually. Being the main government health services provider, DHA’s scope of service includes Primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare services delivered through 40 clinical centers.

The Corporate Quality and Excellence department provides business support across the organization through its 3 sections, that have underwent radical transformation starting 2019:

Quality Management section:

This was initiated by the reformation of the scattered quality management systems in DHA to develop the unified organizational “DHA Quality Management Model” which focused on consistently enhancing clinical and administrative standards and continuous improvement. The model streamlined organizational activities in line with international best practices across healthcare accreditation, administrative management systems and clinical support. This model had a tremendous impact on DHA, including 70% cost saving and around 50% reduction on survey man-days for clinical accreditations, as well as 20% cost and man-day savings on the newly introduced integrated management system, enabling DHA to implement a more extensive network of quality standards.

With this in place, it clearly contributed to DHA’s strategic direction, with 97% of healthcare facilities in Dubai being internationally accredited, positioning Dubai as the city with the highest number of JCI-accredited healthcare facilities worldwide.

In addition to the JCI-accredited emergency preparedness plans, which were developed for all clinical facilities in DHA, the section also introduced business continuity standards (ISO 22301) to DHA, which was a major factor for the high organizational preparedness during COVID-19.

Due to its enhanced quality infrastructure, the section was also instrumental in certifying DHA as the first organization globally with the General guidelines for safe working during COVID-19 Pandemic (ISO/PAS 45005: 2020) in a timely manner. This was important for the organization to safeguard its employees and customers.

Business Process Management section:

In parallel, the business process management section enhanced its business process framework to formulate a 360 degrees view of all its processes through conglomerating a number of guiding principles. These include Dubai Government and DHA’s strategic direction, the DHA Quality Management model standards, risk management, amongst others. Accordingly, the department supported all business units to model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize and automate business processes. The outcome from this exercise was developing an agile business process management framework with a total of 1346 business processes, 91% automated steps of service provision processes, 95% process compliance with international standards, a total of 94 process improvement projects in comparison with 27 in 2016.

Thanks to DHA’s business process resilience culture that was spread across the organization, DHA was able to adapt to organizational changes during COVID-19 pandemic, this was done through updating 85 processes and introducing 32 new COVID-19 specific processes. Examples to these changes include:

-Emphasizing existing services such as telemedicine to serve 70,000 beneficiaries, in comparison to 800 prior to COVID-19

-Repurposing existing centers to segregate them into 3 clean, 5 mixed and 3 fever centers to ensure a safe patient journey

-Increasing capacities to serve COVID-19 patients and turning more services into distance including employees’ training and skill development

Corporate Excellence section:

While the Excellence section was setting internal frameworks to help engage, develop and motivate employees to enhance DHA’s service delivery and to improve the organizational ability to consistently achieve local, regional and international recognitions on their best practices. Since introducing the DHA awards participation policy in 2019, DHA achieved 167% increase in the number of recognitions.During the pandemic, and due to other organizational priorities, the section continued to engage in local and international platforms, which led to achieving 20 recognitions with ZERO budget, as well as generating an amount of 650,000 dirhams through recognitions that will be used to towards enhancing organizational performance.

Summary:

-36 international certifications/accreditations in DHA leading to higher patient safety, mature operations and business continuity practices, along with happier customers.

-Holistic and Dynamic Award participation plan lead to 40 Awards won in 2019 & 2020.

-117 Total number of processes designed and updated for organizational units in response to COVID-19, with 92 % happiness about Dubai Government service procedures being innovative and fast by the Society.

-89.03 % internal Stakeholders’ happiness about the support provided by the Department Excellence Team, 90.8 % about communication and 88.7% about knowledge sharing efforts.

-Following the FOCUS-PDCA approach which resulted in an easier and improved patient journey.

-Spreading the culture of excellence through intensive workshops and communication Messages with more than 3,000 trainees

-Qualifying employees for excellence through the distinguished bank, with employees earning international recognitions and awards.