Christmas is an enjoyable time with our families. Behind the scenes lots of planning and preparation goes on to make the day enjoyable.
I’ve spent lots of time in the US recently visiting a number of great hospitals. Having visited many hospitals around the world, I’ve listened to lots of discussions regarding the best models for funding healthcare systems. And while there may be quite wide philosophical differences between US multi payer systems and the single payer system adopted by most commonwealth countries, one thing is clear....
The Emendo consultants have been on-site and undertaken the analysis. Your new CapPlan system has been installed and configured. Your PIMS HL/7 data feed up and running.
In the healthcare environment the requirement for a more sophisticated and cohesive approach to planning is increasing all the time with the need to be confident we can deliver high quality healthcare to our patients, in both a timely and affordable fashion.
How prepared are we for the Rugby World Cup? The third largest sporting event in the world is expected to bring 85,000 international visitors to New Zealand. No doubt some of those visitors will require some kind of health services during their stay. An event of this magnitude may present a massive influx of patients to many of our hospitals, and quality standards must be maintained.
Once we successfully carry out an analysis of the patient journey it becomes possible to identify bottlenecks and overlap, and start making process improvements to assist patient flow.
Emendo recently introduced a new team of clinical experts to help hospitals meet increasingly challenging operational targets and achieve better patient outcomes with CapPlan. Alan Spinks, Clinical Advisor shares his thoughts on The Patient Journey.
Optimisation within hospitals is about creating a cohesive plan and scheduling or anticipating the correct mix of cases to meet demand, achieve hospital targets, and safely maximise use of the resourced (eg, beds, theatre/OR sessions) capacity.
Simulation, optimisation and forecasting are mathematical approaches used within the discipline of management science (also known as operations research) with the aim of solving business problems. Our aim is to try and develop mathematical models for health planning which remain practical and provide real value, without becoming overly complicated.
Within hospitals, operational planners can do a lot of analysis and modelling work around patient flow and capacity to inform management decisions. The element of my work that particularly interests me is how we can provide the right kind of models and tools to assist them to provide the required outputs to assist decision making.
One of the key functions we are aiming to provide is the ability to visualise what the future would look like based on certain assumptions and then be able to plan for it.
In my last blog I talked about moving from working in reactive day to day chaos, to proactively planning ahead for the predicted peaks and troughs. This is a critical change that needs to happen to manage hospitals of the future.
Before we can deal with what’s happening ‘in the now’ we need know where we are heading and what we are trying to achieve.
Data integrity is a problematic area for most healthcare organisations, and often the task is so daunting that it’s easier to brush it under the carpet and carry on crippled as usual.
While CapPlan makes the greatest difference in healthcare organisations with 100 beds or more, the ability to provide ‘live’ visibility across all central and regional hospitals large and small is one of the most powerful benefits of the technology.
Let’s not mince words. Without a predictive capacity planning tool a hospital is running blind and putting both patient and staff safety at risk.
The current environment is that publically funded hospitals have to take what patients they get. And at peak or quiet periods where they might have too many staff on leave, patient safety can potentially be seriously compromised.
Typically within Health Authorities there is a party that determines how much funding a hospital will be allocated.
Usually this spend will be broken down by speciality and driven by particular activities. For example, at a simple level, if waiting lists in orthopaedics are too long, they might allocate money to have more activity in this speciality.
Production planning has historically had a bad connotation in Health. People don’t like that they might be thought of as widgets in a production line.
This perception barrier has come about as a result of successful practices in outside sectors being increasingly applied within health. An example of this is the lean environment that started at Toyota.