CapPlan cuts down hospital chaos

“People are trying to get more out of the health system and everyone is looking for solutions whether it’s the chief financial officer counting the cost of empty beds or the director of nursing trying to undo patient gridlocks and deliver a satisfying nursing experience.”

Many hospital departments tend to act in silos with each doing their own thing, so CapPlan has been developed as standalone modules that can be linked together to give an accurate picture across one hospital operating system.

Currently the modules include Emergency Visibility for emergency departments, Inpatient and Theatre Flow for operating theatres and inpatients, while work continues on refining an outpatient module.

“This is about a year away from completion but once that is up and running we will have all of the four modules that we can take to the hospital market,” says Burns.

“Further into the future the plan is to add Primary Healthcare solutions so that eventually the hospital will link up with the general practitioners. Then you’ll be able to plan right across the medical continuum and out the back end into post-hospital care.”

While Emendo already has a presence in the UK and Canada, it would like to further expand into these regions but the sales process takes about 12 to 18 months of planning and research.

“You have to put in a lot of money up front,” says Tinkler, “so you want to make sure you get it right. You have to get the right partners and right reference sites and not go in just flailing around.” Fortunately, Emendo is finding the health sector is relatively recession proof.

“Health inflation has grown so rapidly that it is becoming unsustainable so any solution that promotes patient care in an efficient way is becoming increasingly attractive,” says Tinkler.

“For the next year much of the health sector spending is already locked in to some extent so we don’t think, even if there are cutbacks in health, that we will see anything till the middle of next year.”

Burns says he has found one of the biggest challenges of selling the software is dealing with the political issues around change. “It’s very difficult in health to change something. So what we are doing is trying to get people to see that this is not a negative but change in the sense of how a hospital is managed.

“The one thing we always have to do is cross-sell into a hospital. You have to talk to the executive team because they want to hear how they can save money and cope with an increased patient load. Equally you have to convince the director of nursing that this is going to be safer for patient care.

“They often don’t believe us that it is possible to predict events in a hospital. We always win the argument by proving it.”

Events can be anything from flu outbreaks to doctors’ strikes. Dot McKeen, service manager acute care and resources at the Counties Manukau DHB says being able to see hard data on patient flow, staffing, theatre scheduling and other critical management tasks makes it possible to immediately gauge where the pressure is.

“We were able to plan efficiently to cover the period around the doctors’ strike when there were fewer patients in the hospital during the strike, but a predictable surge in bed occupancies immediately afterwards.”

The modelling ability of CapPlan means that staff and bed availability can be adjusted as soon as an event occurs or is known to be occurring.

“Flow and communication between departments is increased dramatically when staff can quickly see where demand is greatest and where resources can be reallocated when required,” says Tinkler.

Capacity planning not only matches anticipated variations in day-to-day operations but also longer-term demand. After all, freeing up hidden capacity is a much better use of resources than finding money to build bigger hospitals. And you don’t need a crystal ball to see that.