CapPlan cuts down hospital chaos
A Christchurch software company has made predicting what happens in hospitals a whole lot easier
Tuesday, December 22 2009 || Features || BY Kim Triegaardt
It’s a challenge eagerly faced by Nick Burns, director of Christchurch software company Emendo, one of the 10 finalists in NZTE’s Focus on Health Challenge business development competition.
“We proved it is possible to predict what is going to happen.”
Burns is behind the successful development of software that allows hospitals to match their staffing and resources to patient activity. Known as CapPlan, the software shows hospital staff how many people have been admitted, and how many beds are available at any time of day. After all, as any restaurant owner will tell you it’s the empty table that’s the most expensive and similarly in any hospital, empty beds cost money. There is pressure on the healthcare sector worldwide to reduce waiting lists, speed up time through emergency departments and operate more cost-effectively. Yet hospitals struggle with patient-flow challenges. There are often bottlenecks in high-demand areas such as the emergency department or post-anaesthesia care. Patient placements depend on where and when a bed can be found.
“Hospitals are often flying by the seat of their pants, and the whole process can be incredibly frustrating,” says Burns.
It was this frustration, experienced at the Canterbury District Health Board in the late 1990s, that saw the former production planner begin to survey, research and build models that provided advice on how the hospital could properly utilise its resources. Up until then there had been no tools to manage what was essentially a complex operation. “Ultimately there is no point in having chaos because it’s not enjoyable for anyone,” says Burns.
His research identified definite trends and surge patterns. “Most of the time we were essentially repeating ourselves and that sort of repetition naturally lends itself to software.”
Together with business partner Bart Visscher, Burns founded Emendo to develop and commercialise the process. Burns approached a team of software developers to create a model that would allow evidence-based decision making on real-time data.
The result was the first generation of the CapPlan software that utilised a range of inbuilt algorithms to accurately predict the patient workload and then match it to staffing and facility capacity.
At the same time it monitored the capacity status in real time, highlighting where adjustments were needed in order to keep patient flows effective. The system worked within a hospital and across an entire network of hospitals.
In 2003 Emendo started to work closely with its first client, the Canterbury DHB, not only to provide capacity planning for the hospital but also on the development and integration of CapPlan itself. Within three years of being piloted in the Canterbury DHB, CapPlan had become an integral part of the hospital’s bed management and production planning systems.
Richard Hamilton, manager of the Canterbury DHB Business Development Unit, says the system came at a time the hospital was trying to move from being a reactive workforce around nursing and bed management to actually planning ahead.
“There was a lot of suspicion initially around forecasting and how reliable these systems were. So when we first trialled the system during Easter 2004 we got the nursing staff to do their normal planning and then after the event we compared our information with theirs and looked at the results.”
The development unit repeated the trial over the busy Christmas and New Year period and was able to show the CapPlan forecasting accurately reflected what happened on a bed-by-bed, day-by-day basis.
