Inspiration and problem description
The COVID-19 crisis has forced the healthcare sector to reallocate resources to manage it. Planned care is rescheduled, which creates a mountain of postponed care need that gets ever larger the longer the COVID-19 crisis continues. In Sweden, during week 14, more than 5000 operations were postponed due to the COVID-19 crisis. In addition, thousands of healthcare appointments have been postponed, as well as other planned care.
Moreover, the European strategy involves a gradual return to normalcy which involves the continuation of social distancing measures for some time from when EU countries start emerging from lockdown. As a consequence of these measures as well as the backlog of cases from the reallocation of resources, the ripples of the COVID-19 crises will be felt long after the spread of the virus has been curtailed. For instance, in Slovenia hospitals are rushing to tackle the backlog of other cases, many of which are critical, while taking the necessary precautions. There is a high risk that for healthcare organisations, this mountain of postponed care leads to a crisis as large – or larger – than the initial COVID-19 crisis.
The large workload in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis means hospital administrators and healthcare managers will need to allocate resources effectively to ensure staff, already exhausted after the COVID-19 crisis, are not overworked. Moreover, the resources such as equipment and rooms should neither be overallocated or underallocated to ensure maximum case capacity.
With backgrounds in healthcare, design, software development and human computer interaction research in healthcare, our team decided to use recent research results to create a resource planning system for hospitals and GPs.
Solution and what it does
The resource planning system has a modular design where, during this weekend, we focused on outpatient visits. All resources can be scheduled and we created a decision support system for healthcare organisations to plan resources for more efficient use by extracting available data from existing systems and visually correlating it with future estimates and resource schedules.
The system will facilitate planning to utilize staff, rooms and other resources as efficiently as possible which will minimise bottlenecks in resource chains; allow planning for adequate recovery for staff (especially important during the COVID-19 crisis); and giving managers an overview of resource demands in the past, present and future which also will be of value to management for budget planning.
The solution involves an integrated calendar that draws from present data of resource availability and correlates it to past performances. The solution will highlight problem areas where the demand and the available resources mismatch so the administrator can reallocate resources, manpower and equipment where needed.
Accomplishments during the weekend
We have a working MVP of the outpatient planning module which is in line with our idea of solution. We’ve designed a concept for what the front end could look like and considered the various future features and use cases. We have received great support by several stakeholders in the healthcare sector, which sees a value in the system for both addressing the mountain of postponed care, but also in a longer perspective of healthcare planning.
Design
The resource planning system takes on a problem for the healthcare sector that has lacked a solution, mainly support for resource planning. The novelty of the system is both in the problem it addresses and the visual decision support it provides. Further, many solutions incorporated in the system have proven themselves from extensive research with regard to understandability, effectiveness and system performance.
The system is designed to be:
- A web application built with Node JS and Vue JS, as well as socket.io to enable real-time data updates and collaboration
- A flexible and decoupled persistence layer to consume and process data from different systems.
Solutions impact on the crisis and afterwards
The resource planning system is estimated to have the most impact in planning resources for the deferred healthcare needs due to the immediate COVID-19 crisis. However, in the long term the system will help administrators and managers to more efficiently plan resources. A low estimate is that for a clinic with capacity for 6 simultaneous outpatient doctor visits, optimal resource planning can increase the number of outpatient visits with >400 per year.
What's next for GMJ resource planning
The first step is to take the MVP of the outpatient module into a functional product. This includes the following steps:
- More user-friendly administrative interface including a mobile platform
- On site test of the system in hospital environment
- Easy integration of existing data sources at test hospital
- Setting up a market and support organisation
Further planning is development of modules for operation, and subsequent hospital admission.
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