New horizons in healthcare delivery
We bring the power of advanced simulation and associated Operations Research technologies to help hospitals with the design and delivery of their services to patients.
Improving patient flows through Operations Research (OR)
Hospitals are complicated places. Every day they must face the problem of how best to meet complex, often rapidly changing, clinical demands with the finite resources that are actually available to them. Unlike many manufacturing and service industries, few hospitals can draw upon the proven capabilities of OR based technologies to guide them with capacity planning and with their daily operations.
At Hospital Navigator we study the logistics of hospital services. We use management science and OR techniques to enable hospitals to treat patients better, to meet performance targets and yet contain costs.
Clinical solutions from commercial "know how"
We use "know how" gained in the commercial world through our parent company, Systems Navigator, to build computer based simulations that mimic real life clinical activities. Systems Navigator numbers many prestigious organisations such as Shell, Nestlé, ABN Amro, Total, the UK Home Office and Rockwell Automation amongst its clients.
Our healthcare solutions enable doctors, nurses and managers to understand the practicalities of how they deliver their services to patients. We show where queues will form, how those queues will behave and how to eliminate them; what physical resources, such as beds, operating theatres, and imaging systems are needed and when; and how best to organise the work of the staff that delivers care.
During the past two years we have successfully implemented a number of OR solutions within NHS teaching and district general hospitals.
What are OR technologies?
There are many ways in which management science and OR can use informatics to study and improve business processes. Foremost amongst a range of techniques that we use are those of discrete event simulation and systems optimisation.
Discrete event simulation is particularly suited to the representation of hospital services because of its ability to reflect the non-steady state behaviours that typify clinical demand. As its name suggests, discrete event simulation treats each arrival, usually that of a patient, into a model of a hospital system as a specific individual and records the experiences of that particular individual as he or she passes through the processes within the model. In this way, the queues and associated delays that occur at times of peak demand are clearly revealed, in precise statistical terms. An accurate picture emerges of the extremes of system performance in a way that does not occur with more commonly used modelling techniques that use averaging methods. Discrete event simulation is the best way to understand the effects of the peaks and troughs of clinical demand.
Computer based optimisation techniques enhance the value of outputs from a discrete event simulation model. They allow you to define a performance target and then perform an automated sequence of simulation experiments that, with each successive iteration, through a methodical adjustment of the key dependent variables, converge upon the optimal settings for the system. The newly optimised set of operating parameters may now be implemented in real life.
