Surgical Services Forecasting

Surgical Services is one of the most valuable assets of a hospital. Hospitals invest vast amounts of money to build, equip and staff operating rooms and offer time in these rooms to surgeons, hoping for effective utilization. Typically, hospitals try to manage the allocation of this time through management of block schedules. Block management is traditionally retrospective and takes months or even quarters to make meaningful change in the effective allocation of OR times.

Surgical Services Forecasting changes the paradigm. With Forecasting, hospital leadership can monitor the estimated use of the Operating Rooms, identify the "white space" within the OR schedule, collaboratively work with surgeons and surgeons' offices to identify additional cases, and proactively market the unused time to other physicians.

Surgical Services Forecasting for the first time enables hospital administration to manage their most valuable resource proactively, with a firm handle on what will happen weeks to months ahead, rather than trying to make decisions looking months or quarters behind.

Key Features of the Surgical Services Forecasting Module

Forecasts

Refreshed forecasts are delivered daily to all designated individuals via email.   The analytics distribution can be customized by user or user groups to ensure the delivery of the appropriate reports at the right time.   In addition, users can interact with the forecasts and drill down to day,  surgeon, or block level to analyze the forecasts.

Some examples of forecast report distribution are:

·         C-Suite:  Summary dashboards that can be customized to show forecasted cases vs budget, percent available time scheduled, or actual cases scheduled by location (site, custom OR grouping,) date (individual day, week, month,) specialty or block levels.

·         OR Leadership:  Forecast detail by day, expanding the summary reports by block information, showing in detail the forecasted allocations, budget performance, and percentage of allocated times used by surgeon or block group. 

·         Finance:  Actual and Forecasted number of cases against budget by all the dimensions above and adding surgeon affiliation, such us employed vs private physicians. 

·         Clinic Managers:  Forecasts by surgeon, showing all the scheduled and projected activity of the individual surgeons in the OR schedule and the availability of their block times. 

·         Analysts:  Direct access to forecast models to create custom reports using the actual and forecasted information.

Forecasting Models

Forecasting models are created using historic information and calculated using statistical and machine learning algorithms.  All models are typically refreshed weekly, ensuring analysis of most up-to-date practice patterns and seasonal changes. Our models analyze usage patterns of each site and surgeon separately.  Individual models include outpatient forecast, inpatient forecast, day-of-surgery add-ons forecast, day-of-surgery cancellations adjustments and others. All models can have modifiers based on block time allocations, block time releases, historical maximums, and other limits calculated via statistical means.

Forecast Validation

Validation of forecasts and ensuring user acceptance is achieved by regular delivery of forecast validation reports measuring the accuracy of historical forecasts against actual performance.  Accuracy is measured for forecasts performed a set number of days out from the day of surgery.

Integration / Implementation

The Forecasting Module is provided as a plug and play, fully managed service, assuring accuracy of the underlying data and forecasts generated.  Brighthospital manages all aspects of the module, including integration and accuracy of budgets, block schedules and block releases. Forecasts and forecast models are refreshed automatically by integrating with the surgical scheduling systems and EHRs using available APIs or nightly scheduled reports.