Big insights into patient flow

S : scientific #bd14 | big data conference 28 Dr Sankalp Khanna Research Scientist The Australian E-Health Research Centre, CSIRO Sankalp completed a PhD in 2010 looking at intelligent techniques to model and optimise the complex, dynamic and distributed processes of elective surgery scheduling. He is currently a Research Scientist at the CSIRO Australian e-Health Research Centre. His research interests include applied artificial intelligence, prediction and forecasting, planning and scheduling, multi agent systems, distributed constraint reasoning, and decision making and learning under uncertainty. Big insights into patient flow Sarah Dods, Justin Boyle, Sankalp Khanna, John O’Dwyer, David Sier, Ross Sparks, Norm Good, Derek Ireland, Christine O’Keefe, David Hansen CSIRO Computational Informatics, Australia The Australian E-Health Research Centre, CSIRO, Australia SUMMARY Improving patient flow in hospitals is a significant challenge for any efforts across the globe aimed at addressing overcrowding, improving service delivery and preparing for the rising demand for healthcare. The complexity of the healthcare system however demands multiple improvements across the gamut of the health service to work together if sustained improvements in patient flow are to be delivered. Needing significant volumes of data from disparate sources ranging from hospital information systems to twitter feeds to be processed, often in real time, innovation in patient flow presents significant big data challenges but offers the opportunity to deliver significant benefits to the process. In this manuscript, we present our efforts to deliver improvements to patient flow across various areas of hospital service delivery and demonstrate how this distributed modular approach can help achieve organisational improvements to patient flow. INTRODUCTION The most visible challenge facing our healthcare system is overcrowding in hospitals, which has been labelled an ‘international crisis’. Overcrowding and long hospital waiting periods have a significant impact on the quality of patient care and patient experience. Our health services research team is helping hospitals meet performance targets recently introduced by the national health reform, whilst solving the challenge of overcrowding and system bottlenecks. In this manuscript, we provide an overview of the patient flow modelling research currently being undertaken and how our analytics, optimisation and operational decision support tools are working on patient flow solutions across hospitals to deliver big insights into this particularly big problem. Figure 1. Big data analytics: supporting organisational improvements to patient flow DESCRIPTION In this section, we describe some of our key research efforts aimed at solving various patient flow problems across hospitals to show how the various solutions can fit together to provide big insights and deliver enterprise wide patient flow improvements. Emergency departments (EDs) are critically overcrowded and struggle to respond to day-to-day arrivals. Contrary to conventional wisdom that emergency patient volumes are unpredictable, the number of admissions per day can be predicted with remarkable accuracy. We have developed the Patient Admission and Prediction Tool (PAPT), that employs historical data to provide an accurate prediction of not only the expected patient load but their medical urgency and specialty, and how many will be admitted and discharged. Our PAPT platform allows hospital management to accurately forecast service demands for inpatient and ED beds, well in advance. Dr Sarah Dods Health Services Research Theme Leader CSIRO Dr Sarah Dods leads CSIROs research in health services delivery within their Digital Productivity and Services Flagship. In this role, Sarah leads multidisciplinary research teams focused on supporting the future sustainability of Australia’s health system through evidence based digital services innovation to improve healthcare productivity, quality of care, and access to services for all Australians. Sarah has over 20 years experience in multidisciplinary innovation, including mining R&D, high-tech startups, and academia, spanning research and business roles. Her experience includes 13 years researching into future optical broadband networks, which are now becoming an everyday reality. [email protected] [email protected]