[Controlling of medical goods through process-oriented quality management. Interface between a cardiac surgery...

Medical goods and laboratory costs represent approximately 24% and 3.6% of the total costs in German university hospitals, respectively. Therefore, efficient instruments to control the costs of medical goods may help to reduce the costs. By implementation of an interface to an external consulting institute during the process of introducing a quality management system according to DIN EN ISO 9001:2000 in a university cardiac-surgery department, the costs of medical goods could be reduced by 3.3% per operation with extracorporeal circulation, in spite of an unchanged surgery spectrum in the clinic. By implementation of obligatory laboratory standards, the costs of laboratory investigations could be additionally reduced by 35%. The introduction of a process-based quality management system allows to achieve efficient control of the costs of medical goods and laboratory investigations.