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.
However, many hospitals remain incapable of optimising their operations to achieve their targets or keep within the bed capacity. This is because their management and clinicians often operate in silos, which means there is no structure in place to create a cohesive plan across all specialities and areas of the hospital to optimise resourcing accordingly.
The Canterbury District Health Board in New Zealand is one health organisation that is encouraging clinicians and managers to work together and develop a single plan to optimise hospital wide operations.
Planners are now able to enter the schedule of both the theatre/OR sessions and bed capacity into CapPlan and automatically receive the optimal mix of cases and schedule of activities throughout the week which fits within the available resourcing.
CapPlan does this by creating the plans and type of activity in the Theate Flow/OR module, while the Inpatient module engages nursing management to resource to the demand forecast for both surgical and medical patients.
The aim is to enable management to visualise the future, understanding what’s possible both on a single hospital and regional scale, and to agree a plan for the year in terms of volumes of patients, LOS, and then use the forecasting and patient flow models to build a single cohesive plan.
The ‘proof of the pudding’ is obviously in when we monitor the plan against actual data. As mentioned in an earlier blog, we achieved 95% accuracy in our occupancy predications for a Canadian health authority when combining the impact of theatre/OR plans with demand from other patient groups.
If all goes according to plan, as it should, hospitals using CapPlan will be able to drill down further and question any findings, such as why some patients stay longer than others, or why one hospital or region is getting more patients than expected, and so on.
Andrae Gaeth Product Specialist, Emendo