Background
The specialist health service is responsible for meeting the need for surgery in the population. To meet this need, the hospitals must manage and plan optimally within the available capacity. The capacity of the health service to treat patients is roughly dependent on three conditions:
- Physical conditions (number of operating theatres, equipment)
- Personnel (doctors, nurses, health professionals, and assistants)
- Availability (opening hours and utilization of time).
In addition, patient characteristics, types of treatments, medical technology development, logistics of goods and equipment also affect the utilization of available resources. The Office of the Auditor General has pointed out on four occasions that resource utilization at Norwegian hospitals is low (2004-5, 2013-14, 2017-18, and 2021-22). Helse Nord RHF (HN) has recently surveyed surgery capacity in the region and the conclusion after this review supports the need for the development of digital planning tools to improve resource utilization.
Planning in a longer time perspective (>12 months) is necessary to adapt the business to future needs in order to be sustainable. Planning in a shorter time perspective (< 12 months) is necessary to adapt to fluctuations both in need and by the fact that availability of anesthesia and surgery capacity is affected by factors externally (eg pandemic, strike) and internally (access to qualified personnel).
There is a need to develop digital tools that tie together the different levels of planning as useful decision-support tools in hospital capacity management and planning. For the strategic and tactical level, there are currently no available digital tools to support decisions.
Purpose of the project
The overall aim of the project is to improve planning in order to achieve optimal utilization of the total anesthesia and operational resources in the hospitals.
Work will be done to develop a holistic digital solution to plan and manage operations better than today. The effect will be that the hospital's resource set-up and use are best adapted to the population's prioritized needs for surgical operations. The most important effect will be that more patients can receive surgical treatment with the same amount of resources available and that the service adapts to future needs. Another important effect is better predictability for other units involved in the care pathway (outpatient clinics, bedside posts, X-ray, etc.), and the possibility for better long-term planning.
Status of the project
The project consists of representatives from UNN HF, St Olavs Hospital, SINTEF, SPKI, Norwegian Centre for E-Health Research (NSE), Helse Nord IKT, and DeepInsight. We have received funding from the Research Council of Norway to run a pilot project (Pilot Helse).
The pilot project is led by Snorre Manskow Sollid, operations manager for surgeries at UNN HF.
