SBIR Phase I: An Integrated Analytics and Scheduling System for Operations Management in Hospitals

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be the significant performance improvement in hospitals, a potential to increase case load, and reduce lag time for patients to get surgery, and a reduction of associated costs without compromising on quality of care. This will lead to an overall reduction of hospital costs, and thus healthcare insurance costs, contributing to the achievement of goals set forth in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Hospitals have been making large investments recently in upgrading their Information Technology systems and implementing EHR (electronic health records) information systems, thereby leading to data collection on an unprecedented scale. Our project will leverage this massive collection and enable transformation of hospital processes, thereby leading to generation of value for the large investments in EHR systems being made. Everyone will be better off: Patients will have better care at lower costs, Insurers will lower costs, Hospitals can see lower costs and higher revenue, and last but not the least, it will reduce cognitive overload on the clinical and non-clinical staff thereby leading to better patient care and greater job satisfaction. The proposed project will research methods to improve scheduling of surgeries in hospitals. The goals include more efficient utilization of expensive resources such as operating rooms, surgeon and nursing staff time by reducing operating room idleness, delays and overtime costs. The project will develop: (i) A number of algorithms for advance scheduling, online scheduling, and real-time scheduling; (ii) Predictors that will combine surgeon estimates and data via online learning; (iii) A suite of algorithms for deep analytics of fine-grained EHR data and other hospital information systems, identify bottlenecks and provide real-time situational awareness; (iv) A visualization tool that will enable staff to input real-time information, quickly understand schedules and make manual changes when necessary; (v) A communication tool that will enable real-time communication between hospital staff, and with the patient and their families. Some progress on these objectives has already been made and our back-testing on existing datasets from four hospitals suggests scope for significant performance gains. A deployment of the system developed for a pilot study is planned. We will follow up on this project by also investigating scheduling in the radiology department, out-patient department and cancer infusion and other clinical centers.