Maximise use of your capacity, to drive high cost weekend work back into core hours
October 17, 2018 • Reading time 2 minutes
Many hospitals are not delivering planned care activity to plan. This is impacting their patients, who are waiting longer, their performance (RTT), and their finances. At the same time, core capacity is being underutilised.
Increasing throughput in core hours is hard and often runs into resistance: “theatres are busier than ever”, “case-mix is more complex”, “staff are new”, “turnaround times are longer”, “there aren’t enough beds”. So, recovering planned throughput levels can mean putting on out of hours services or running weekend lists. This means paying premium rates for staff.
This may help recover planned activity levels, but it leads to financial pressure. And the data often suggest there is opportunity to do more.
Space Finder is a tool that uses AI to help organisations access this opportunity. It does this by providing visibility of where the space exists on future lists, so that additional cases can be booked. At the same time, it takes into account of local constraints or rules that impact list planning, so fewer operations need to be rearranged or cancelled due to a lack of equipment.
Space Finder is different to anything else available now. It uses state of the art AI to use over 10,000 pieces of information, so that its outputs are precise and tailored to local teams and their environment. As a learning algorithm, it gets better over time and adjusts to changes in team or procedure, so it does not bake in inefficiency or out of date processes.
By making theatres run more smoothly and with fewer interruptions, surgeons can spend more time being surgeons and less time sorting out administrative challenges.
Find out more here.
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