ProModel Online Newsletter

Healthcare

A message from Brian Scott, Managing Director, ProModel Healthcare Solutions:

Congratulations to Pierce Story, Director of Marketing and Sales of ProModel Healthcare Solutions, for successfully serving as the chairperson for the 17th Annual Society for Health Systems (SHS) Management Engineering Forum, February 12 - 13, 2005, Dallas, Texas. From the President’s Message in the February 2005 SHS newsletter:

Judging from all the feedback I’ve received, this year’s Annual Conference was a tremendous success. The attendance count was up 12% from last year, to surpass the 200 mark for the first time in recent years. My gratitude goes out to Pierce Story, the 2005 Conference Chair, to the entire Conference Committee, and to all the speakers who contributed their insights.

ProModel’s Healthcare division also had a booth at the SHS conference to showcase our simulation technology and solutions.

See the SHS web site for additional details.

Pierce Story also attended the Emergency Nurses Association (ENA) annual conference, March 12-14, 2005, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. At this conference, Blake Medical Center, an HCA Inc. facility, presented the outcomes from a ProModel-HCA ED project improvement project. Through the use of ProModel’s ED Simulator™ technology, Blake’s Emergency Department was able to reduce their patients’ length of stay by over 40%, even with a 10% increase in patient visits!

Clients spoke and we listened! Based on feedback from over a dozen Emergency Departments that benefited from ED Simulator™ (EDS) v1.0, ProModel’s software development team and the healthcare team designed and developed the next generation of EDS to enhance the reporting and analysis capability, and to improve the tool’s ease-of-use. ProModel is in the final stages of developing EDS version 2.0, and it will be available soon for shipping.

Healthcare modeling projects tend to be very data intensive (within Emergency Departments, for example, there are multiple patient types that vary across many key attributes (initial acuity, final acuity, disposition, required lab tests, required radiology procedures, etc.), multiple processes (triage, admitting, transfer, etc.), and multiple, independent staffing schedules (physicians, nurses, registration, etc.). Unfortunately, the data quality and availability at healthcare facilities can vary dramatically from one facility to the next.

To bridge the data gap between the required data inputs for a successful simulation model and readily available data, ProModel has developed a variety of paper-based data-collection templates, and has recently piloted a PDA-based data collection process.

Additionally, ProModel has developed an extensive data preparation methodology to expedite the process for analyzing and scrubbing raw data for use with simulation models. Our refined data processing methodology and database tools reduce the data preparation time from days or weeks to a single day in many cases. This reduces the “data hurdle” for tools like EDS and MedModel, and makes it possible for non-statisticians to continually refresh data over time to ensure their models accurately reflect the current environment.

Below are several screen shots of our advanced data analysis tools and ED Simulator™ reports.
	Figure 2 Hour-Of-Day Arrival Patterns – Helpful When Aligning Staffing Schedules (Capacity) With Patient Arrival Patterns (Demand). Higher-Variability Periods (Reflected By The Width Of The Yellow Band) Reflects The Need For “Surge Capacity” To Accommodate Spikes In Demand.
Figure 1 Histogram & Percentiles – Useful For Identifying Outliers For Removal Before Fitting A Distribution

Figure 3 Hourly ED Census Depicts Patients Waiting for an ED Bed	Figure 4 Patient Length-of-Stay in the ED With 95% Confidence Intervals