A general hospital in the Netherlands(*) recently engaged Care Dynamics for a special consulting assignment, to advise the hospital’s executive management in its specification of the requirements for a new hospital building. In order to continue its tradition of providing excellent care in the face of projected demand growth, the hospital’s management needed to estimate the optimal number of beds that it will need in the new hospital building under various growth scenarios, for each of its specialties, clusters of specialities and specific/functional wards.
Care Dynamics was asked to provide these estimates, substantiating its advice with detailed quantitative analysis based on historical data and a set of growth scenarios for the coming 10 years.
Upon starting the consulting engagement Care Dynamics’ advisors met with a senior representative of the hospital’s New Building committee, and jointly defined the exact scope and pre-conditions for the exercise.
The team then initiated a focused data acquisition process, in which larges sets of data and operational parameters / constraints were collected, verified, and compiled into models to support the quantitative analysis process.
Care Dynamics’ Hospital Operations Intelligence unit supported the consultants in the field by performing thorough analyses of the hospital’s past admission data, using its proprietary data analysis tool Admissions Data Analyser (ADA) and its advanced analytic toolset to aggregate and further corroborate the findings.
The consulting team subsequently studied and estimated the sensitivity of the requirements to projected demand scenarios, concluding with estimating the optimal number of beds required for each speciality/cluster/ward under the various growth scenarios.
Throughout the engagement the consulting team liaised regularly with the hospital’s representatives and actively solicited feedback from key stakeholders. The intermediate recommendations were then presented to the management and the feedback was used to further optimise the recommendations and compile the final advice report.
(*) As a rule Care Dynamics keep the identity of clients of our Hospital Operations Consulting unit confidential.
