The Customer

A large hospital group based in the U.S.A, with over 20 locations all over the country.

The Challenge

The ability to centralize the scheduling of all resources associated with a hospital operating room. Having a dedicated administration team at each location to perform this function is both inefficient and expensive. However, centralized administration of geographically distributed hospitals also presents a considerable challenge. Analytica was called in to design an optimal solution to this problem.

The Solution

Analytica systems analysts spent a considerable amount of time understanding the exact process of scheduling resources for an operation. A detailed analysis of the problem indicated that a centralized administration facility was not the best answer to the problem. It would put too much burden on a single administration team to maintain the status of all the resources connected with every hospital.

Analytica suggested an "oligarchy" solution, where a few number of hospitals would act as the nodal scheduling centers for all the other hospitals in their immediate vicinity. Since OR-related equipment and supplies were procured and distributed centrally, this allowed each nodal center to maintain the inventory for all hospitals under them, reducing the burden on the central administrator.

A very strong administration facility was created in order to centrally manage and administer the entire system. The software was designed to be very flexible, and could be configured to allow any operating room (in any hospital) to be scheduled from any center.

This solution helped to reduce the total number of administration teams from 20 to only 3 - leading to significant savings for the client. At the same time, having the ability to operate more than one "scheduling center" provided the redundancy required in the unlikely event of a network-related failure at any center. And most importantly, it provided the scalability for the client to add more scheduling centers as required.

The project was co-managed by the client, and provided a proof of concept of the "dual-shore" development approach. This constant interaction with the client throughout the development life cycle helped to ensure that the software met all the client's requirements completely.

The project was handled in an entirely off-shore mode- from the design to the final deployment - and delivered on schedule. Analytica performed a remote install from our lab in India, to our client servers in the U.S.A., and load tested the application to perform to the customer's requirements. Complete application support, too, was provided remotely overcoming considerable challenges in remote management, training, and administration.