Case study - CapPlan

CapPlan is being relied on to make daily decisions about hospital capacity, plan beds and match occupancy and nursing resource at Waikato Hospital.

Poor patient flow is a country- wide hospital issue. Hospitals have always had difficulty understanding demand and many do not have a clear linkage between planning processes and daily operational management.

There was also poor visibility of what was happening in Waikato Hospital and a frequent inconsistency between supply and demand resulting in bed block, long waits in the ED for beds, and regular elective surgery cancellations. Waikato Hospital piloted CapPlan in late 2007, followed by a full implementation in February 2009 across all inpatient areas.

Before implementing CapPlan, Waikato Hospital’s operational issues were not extraordinary. Delwyne Martin, Bed Capacity Manager at Waikato, said every winter the hospital experienced ED overload with more patients than it could cope with.

“Patients would go to inadequately resourced wards and everyone would be working over capacity.”

Chief information officer Alan Grainer saw CapPlan demonstrated at a conference and thought it would be ideal to help Waikato Hospital match occupancy and nursing resource.

CapPlan, developed by Christchurch-based Emendo, is a capacity planning and forecasting solution for healthcare organisations. Data from Waikato Hospital’s patient management system (iPM), extracts from the staff rostering system and nursing role ratios got loaded into CapPlan. All ward configuration and historic changes reflected the actual context over time.

Emendo then demonstrated the use of CapPlan to drill down into patient occupancy data and highlight patterns and trends. This allowed Waikato Hospital staff to target areas to improve patient flow and capacity planning. Emendo founder and director sales and marketing Nick Burns said the pilot results were impressive.

“Emendo supported Waikato DHB management in achieving their project goals by supplying relevant information and subsequent recommendations for change. The CapPlan methodology helped to successfully identify capacity planning and patient flow opportunities for Waikato DHB, and also created a Christmas bed plan.”

Every time a patient is admitted, transferred or discharged in iPM or a change made in the staffing system (OneStaff), a message goes to CapPlan, refreshed every 12 minutes and it then tracks real time actual patient occupancy with the projected occupancy to plan staff and beds to.

As a result, the Waikato Hospital daily reports have a year to date projection accuracy of 99 per cent.

CapPlan supports staff planning, from managing daily variability in demand to rostering and leave management, and annual budget planning.

Deborah Labuschagne
Nurse Manager Operations

Deborah Labuschagne, Nurse Manager Operations said CapPlan models the hospital’s production plan based on predicted workload and demand.

“There is variability – particularly seasonal variability – which allows us to match supply with demand, and translate the data into bed days and staffing FTE resource.

Waikato Hospital tended to be quite conservative in its nurse leave approach. CapPlan’s hard data makes hospital staff more confident about planning for special events, school holidays and Christmas.

”As a result we are capitalising on the reduction in occupancy and allowing more staff leave, while still meeting demand.

“We’re now linking in capacity planning to help us determine if we can meet the demand, and if not, what are our options? If people have not discharged patients or coded their roster, it’s very apparent and staff now understand the importance of accurate information as we use this information to make our decisions.

“It’s been an interesting exercise to go through, and it is quite incredible that it has taken us 15 months of saying ‘Saturday looks bad what are we going to do about it?’ for the change to sink in,” she said.

Waikato Hospital Case Study

CapPlan gives you real time visibility of exactly what the state of your hospital is at any given point in time.

It provides you with information on where you can expect to be in the 24, 48 and 72 hours, giving you the control over how best to manage your hospital over the next 48 hours.

Read the case study.