Helping Our Clients Provide High Quality, Efficient Patient Care
Apply sophisticated analytical tools to solve resource and flow problems, to choose between potential policy/operational alternatives, or to optimize processes.
Provide process improvement analysis and support to help streamline processes for high quality, efficient patient care.
Leverage data to gain insights into operations and practices that improve care and drive efficiencies.
Misaligned bed capacity and allocation leads to long wait times, congestion, and inefficient, lower-quality care. We have employed analytical tools to assess the required inpatient bed capacity and allocation under current and future conditions, while considering variability across seasons and through the week as well as effects on the rest of the organization.
Wait times are a struggle across healthcare and are an important factor in patient satisfaction and provider working conditions. We have applied our techniques to predict and improve waiting times in areas such as surgery, home care services, and emergency departments. We consider how current policies, schedules, budgets, resourcing, and operational decisions affect wait times for service.
Disruptions in patient flow lead to poor patient service, strained resources, and inefficient work processes. Patient flow issues are often caused upstream or downstream from where the symptoms occur. We have developed a discrete-event simulation model to simulate how patients move through the entire hospital (Emergency Department, Operating Rooms and Inpatient Beds) to analyse the whole system process. The model is customizable to any hospital and provides metrics on throughput, wait times, surgical cancellation rates, overtime, bed and OR utilization, and congestion levels. Past clients have been able to simulate, test and refine resources and operating plans for current or predicted demand to achieve the best flow.
Many hospitals struggle with large swings in surgical ward occupancy through the week due to an imbalance in the surgical schedule. This leads to inefficient use of resources and restricted surgical throughput. We used a bed leveling algorithm to determine how to reduce variability in bed occupancy while minimizing the disruption to the surgical schedule.
Our healthcare system is poised to undergo large transformations as we look at ways to revolutionize how healthcare is delivered, including a trend away from institution-based care. However, how to make those changes without compromising patient care is not always clear. We employed data analytics to determine the characteristics of patients suitable for home dialysis.
As technology changes how care is delivered, it can be difficult to predict the impact of these changes. Simulation can help clients visualize the changes, highlight unforeseen consequences, test and evaluate the benefits, and refine new processes virtually before going live with changes. We applied simulation modelling to determine the extent to which an electronic medication, ordering, dispensing and administration process would improve turnaround times and error rates compared to the existing manual system.
I am thrilled to endorse ORCHID Analytics. I have worked extensively with both Carolyn and Azadeh and know them to be reliable, professional, and highly skilled in applying Operations Research in the healthcare industry. I am excited to continue to collaborate with ORCHID as I support their focus on disseminating operations research tools as widely as possible to make the largest impact possible. Carolyn and Azadeh are driven by the desire to use their skills to make a difference in healthcare and understand well the complexities of implementation in this industry.
Dr. Micheal Carter
University of Toronto
We meet with clients to understand their needs, their goals, and the unique characteristics of their organization. We then propose an approach that may involve customizing existing tools, developing new tools, or providing process improvement analysis and recommendations.
Our quantitative expertise and strong ties with the University of Toronto ensures that our solutions are based on proven operations research approaches. Newly developed tools are validated and tested based on academic and industry standards before solutions are proposed.
An “optimal” solution is one that gives the best results under realistic circumstances and meets the needs of all stakeholders. A theoretically optimal solution that can’t be implemented due to politics, incentives, budget, resource restrictions and contracts, work processes, etc. is not a truly optimal solution.
The development, customization and application of analytics tools are done in collaboration with clients and stakeholders to ensure that our solutions fit with our clients’ needs and can be implemented.
Once our initial work is complete, we offer on-going support and training to our customers as needed. Clients will continue to deal with the same person who developed and implemented the initial solution to provide continuity over the long-term – even if/as employees transition at the client organization.
We are a small, partner-driven organization motivated to contribute our knowledge and expertise to improve healthcare delivery. We develop long-term relationships with clients and deliver comprehensive service.
Our clients bring clinical expertise and on-the-ground experience to which we add our experience, technical knowledge, engineering perspective, and quantitative problem-solving tools to deliver practical, implementable, evidence-based solutions.
We specialize in applying operations research to the healthcare industry. We have worked with over 25 healthcare organizations. That means we speak your language. We understand that healthcare has unique challenges, structure and stakeholders that makes solving problems more complicated. That challenge, combined with the ability to make a meaningful impact, is what we love about working in this industry!
We remain current on the academic literature, attend conferences and maintain an affiliation with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Healthcare Engineering. This allows us to provide the latest tools, innovations and techniques to our clients.