CASE STUDY TeWhatu Ora – Health New Zealand, Counties Manukau
Middlemore is the largest hospital operated byTeWhatu Ora - Health New Zealand. It offers secondary- level care and a selected range of community and domiciliary services for the population of Counties Manukau and niche specialist tertiary services for regional and national consumers in orthopaedic and plastic surgery, burns, spinal injury rehabilitation, renal dialysis, and neonatal intensive care.
correct location, attached to the relevant specialty, consultants and nurses, in order to get the specialised care necessary for recovery and discharge. Live dashboards set the scene in the morning bed meetings, showing how many patients need a bed in what area and how many are expected to be discharged. Rosie Whittington, Te Whatu Ora Counties Manukau Health Intelligence Manager, says that with finite resources it is better to understand what is coming through the front door. This enables clinical teams to prepare. “We wanted to visualise the numbers of people coming in over the next week so that we can learn accordingly and predict impact on non-scheduled care,” she says. “Data was available for long- term planning, but we needed data in the short term for hourly and daily forecasting.” They embarked on a project to forecast surgical and medical admissions and discharges over the next seven days, using AI platform Data Robot. An algorithm was trained on historical hospital data, to find patterns in what has happened
At Middlemore Central Command Centre, various dashboards light up the screens. The dashboards are key to the command centre’s role of managing patient flow in the busy hospital and are well used on wards, as well as displayed in the executive suite and incident management meeting room. Users can see at a glance the overall hospital occupancy and a simple traffic light system provides an overview of performance. Using this real time data, the Command Centre can coordinate and overcome obstacles to good patient flow, such as ensuring staff are where they need to be. John Cartwright, General Manager Emergency Department and Middlemore Central, compares the Command Centre to the cockpit of an airplane. “The dashboards provide live information that informs decision
“This information just wasn’t available in the past, and now it’s all right here on our screens and at our fingertips .”
making at an operational level. Like an airplane, we’re not flying blind,” he says.
“We can see at a glance what is going on in the hospital rather than having to call all wards one by one. It is a game changer and allows us to function more efficiently.”
on certain days and weeks, and even hours of the day, in order to forecast the future.
Kirstine Kent, Te Whatu Ora Counties Manukau, Service Manager
Forecasting data enables planning
When a patient is admitted to the hospital, they need a bed in the
It now pulls occupancy data in real time from the Patient Administration
HEALTHCARE ANALYTICS IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND | A HINZ SPECIAL REPORT | 12
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