21st Century Healthcare Consulting has developed and deployed a new Capacity Planner module to help improve community services offered by the UK's National Health Service.
“Delivering health and social care in the community is difficult,” said Paul Henderson, managing director of the London-based consulting firm. “The logistics of managing care in a hospital setting, for example, is difficult enough, but the range of issues multiplies when you are offering care through diverse routes. The nature of the healthcare profession has always meant that some people are on the road traveling to patients, spending time with patients and then having to report back on those patient visits.”
The new planner was designed as a business intelligence solution that would improve planning capabilities of PCTs. Officials at 21C said that by improving these capabilities, the National Health Service would see an overall increase in the quality of community services it provides.
Built on Microsoft-based software, the dashboard features and analyses are expected to help PCTs look into how physician time is spent. This is expected to help PCTs identify individual resource capacity and improve productivity.
“Our BI solution provides PCTs with an opportunity to plan for and therefore manage demand, schedule patients' needs against the capacity and capability in teams and assess the time spent on each activity to look at new ways of improving productivity,” said Henderson. “Ultimately this helps deliver more effective services to patients – and importantly prevents people becoming patients.”
The push for a new planning solution using a BI platform came from the need for specifically adapted online information, company officials said. In the past, they said, such information wasn't adapted for healthcare workers.
21C’s BI solution uses pre-existing platforms to assess and conform to the information needs of its employees without a complex installation process.
“Our tools help staff stay better connected to clinical and business leads and lets the PCT effectively identify where improvements can be made,” Henderson said
