The hospital is an example of inter-dependent environments where critical activities are performed, expensive equipment is used, and key skill sets are required. Timely and cost-controlled execution of processes is essential, and emergencies must be managed.
Further still, a solid proportion of all this is managed via triage. In a walk-in environment, one cannot plan how many people will be admitted for emergency care, how rapidly a patient might decline or when childbirths are going to happen on any given night.
The new world we are in
Operating procedures of course exist, as do tools and working methods, and yet during the last three years, the need for greater adaptability has skyrocketed. Thus, software tools need to become more and more dynamic, rapidly changing in response to shifting conditions, requirements, and environmental factors.
Moreover, hospitals have a variety of resources that need to be efficiently coordinated. Specialized personnel, sophisticated medical equipment, beds, rooms, and supplies are all equally crucial resources to successfully execute critical tasks. As a result, software tools also need to provide a holistic view of, and be able to manage, the whole set of resources.
Gartner, in a recent paper addressing healthcare efficiency, placed human and material scheduling as one of the five key functions to create efficiencies across Patient Throughput and Capacity Management. Scheduling time, burden, cost variance, wait times, and numbers are all business metrics that get affected, but above all of that, solving your resourcing processes can save lives.
‘Cost and revenue pressures on healthcare-delivery organisations continue to mount year over year. This underscores an abiding need for increased operational efficiency and continued digital innovation.’ – Gartner
Breaking the Silos
The need for real-time, multi-resource planning means hospitals can allocate patients, specialised personnel, equipment, rooms, tasks, and machines optimally. It allows for flexibility when urgent issues arise and provides better oversight and clarity on which resources are being over- or under-utilised.
One CIO from a top 10 hospital in Switzerland tells us that the “whole environment needs to better support the dynamic assignment of human and material resources. The problem is, most tools work in silos – doctors in one information system, nurses in another, and the material resources are still in another one”.
Moreover, resource management tools typically have built-in static flows, corresponding to predefined protocols or procedures. They are designed to ensure the smooth operation of the hospital, but they are inadequate to adapt to the unexpected, to evaluate the impact of options to resolve resource conflicts or resource shortage, and they poorly communicate and collaborate on results.
A Contrast of Healthcare Technologies
While a hospital may have state-of-the-art diagnostic and surgical tools, their scheduling and resource planning is often still done on whiteboards, spreadsheets, or other antiquated environments. While these are easily modifiable, which is critical for healthcare planning, they often don’t account for all resources in one place. This leads to double booking of key resources, like a CT scanner or a surgical nurse, while other resources end up under-utilised. This creates expensive operational efficiency gaps that can also be dangerous.
Why choose Planisy?
Planisy is designed to support multi-resource environments -such as hospitals, where time, people, locations, and equipment must be managed as efficiently as possible. Planisy allows the planning and scheduling of these resources to take place within one intuitive interactive workspace to be accessed by all personnel.
Users are no longer limited to switching between the multiple silos of calendars and spreadsheets, with little visibility of the wide-lens hospital ecosystem as it evolves during any given day. Planisy integrates each of these information, empowering users to improve efficiency for staff and patients.
Planisy’s interactive system places new patented techniques into resource management, such as “docking”, which is the gesture of placing digital objects side by side to connect and “overlay” for a clearer view. Users can design the interactive filters necessary for their unique workflow requirements, and items can be placed into the Timeboard (Planisy playground where allocation of resources happen)
as a simple drag and drop -scheduling in one click. The simplicity of these system techniques reduces errors and misallocations and drastically increases productivity.
Try Planisy for free. With our use cases templates, you can get started immediately . Or ask for a demo and we will walk you through Planisy’s capabilities and unique benefits.