Patient Flow Analysis

We've had a great increase in patient volume over the past six months. This has caused a few problems, problems I love to have mind you, but problems none the less. The primary concern we have right now is the patient admissions wait time is exceeding our targeted goals. Our primary goal is superior patient care, and that care begins the moment the patient walks into our hospital. If a patient comes in and has to wait 30 minutes before they are admitted they develop an impression of us before the actual care takes place. This of course is a terrible thing for us as well as the patients.

I'm working on a way to track a patient throughtout the facility in order to identify bottlenecks and possible areas of improvements. I use the term track loosely. I don't intend to use any form of RFID or video monitors to watch a patient. Instead it will all be employee driven. For example each employee that interacts with a patient will be responsible for "logging" that interaction into the patient tracking system. I've just started this project and and evaluating coding it in ASP.NET/C#. I've seen some pretty nifty things that are possible so far.

Been busy

It's been a busy couple of months...

We've got a pretty big project on the horizon at work so I've been putting in some long hours to try and get things ready. The most pressing issues at the moment, and the only action I can actually take at the moment is to redesign our public website and internal intranet.

I've looked over literally dozens of intranet solutions from free opensource options to pricy commercial apps. I worked on trying to get a Plone site for about 2 weeks. I was able to get it customized to a certain degree, but I finally had to admit to myself that I didn't have the time or skills to make it do what I want. Right now I'm looking into Sharepoint. I'm not sure if I could get away with just using Sharepoint services, or if I need the full Portal product. I like the intergration with AD and the document management/versioning features, but to do some of the company-wide things I'd like to do would require the Sharepoint Portal 2003, and they ain't giving it away ($5000).

I'll probably just go with a template for the public site for now. I know they can look cheesy, but it'll have to do until I have time to devote more attention to it.