Making informed capacity decisions with Digital Twin technology

Strategic capacity decisions are inherently complex, with each change creating a ripple effect across the care continuum. Hospital leaders are seeking a methodology that will enable them to evaluate the potential impact of different strategies. Using GE HealthCare’s Digital Twin technology, the Command Center team can provide hospital leaders with a quick and powerful way to model and test different scenarios before any changes are made. As a result, leaders have the visibility they need to save time, resources, and costs while improving confidence in decision-making.

The Digital Twin’s power comes from its ability to simulate and measure the impact of many possible changes simultaneously -- without costly and resource-intensive pilots. As a result, stakeholders are confident about the decisions made because they know each option and every combination of options will be evaluated thoroughly and objectively.

What is the Digital Twin?

The Digital Twin is a discrete event simulation model purpose-built to focus on the problems and scenarios that differentiate healthcare from other industries. It is designed to model patient and staff behavior, variation in demand and supply, and patient pathways with both speed and specificity.

Hospitals and patients are variable, interdependent, and dynamic, rarely acting as the average indicates. Yet, traditional modeling approaches are often static and typically rely on average behaviors, such as average length of stay, average acuity, and average demand. In contrast, the Digital Twin learns the statistical behaviors of patients, staff, and resources, so the scenarios are true to life.

Making informed strategic capacity decisions

For more than twenty years, GE HealthCare has been helping providers make strategic decisions informed by innovative simulation modeling applications. Some examples include:

• Capacity strategy – With a focus on adding capacity without physical expansion, GE HealthCare’s Command Center team uses Digital Twin simulation modeling to help hospitals gain a deep understanding of patient volumes, improve patient placement, optimize workflows, and balance utilization across the system.
• Planned expansions and new builds – When the hospital leadership team needs to determine the size and scope of a planned expansion, our team collaborates with them to simulate capacities, understand how location can impact patient volumes, define future patient placement algorithms, and analyze workflows to define optimal footprints and layouts.
• Department/unit redesign – Modeling different scenarios allows the hospital to focus on clinical pathways and project how different layouts will impact patient flow and clinician workflows before any physical changes are made.

Surge planning at Children’s Mercy Kansas City

Seasonality can impact demand and capacity, especially in pediatrics. Digital Twin technology can help project demand and identify capacity constraints so hospital leaders can take action preemptively. “It's important that we're prepared for surges, and the Digital Twin has been remarkable in helping us do that,” said Stephanie Meyer, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer at Children’s Mercy Kansas City.

Now, they are better equipped to predict when surges will hit, what diagnoses are likely to be most prevalent, and what resources the hospital will need to allocate to open additional bed space during the surge. As a result, Children’s Mercy can have the space prepared in advance and be prudent with resource allocation – valuable healthcare staff can be onboarded, trained, and assigned when and where they are needed most[1].

Optimizing Command Center functionality at AdventHealth

When planning the functional design of a new 12,000-square-foot command center, AdventHealth worked with GE HealthCare’s Command Center team. Using Digital Twin technology to drive a collaborative, data-driven methodology helped the team create comprehensive, integrated improvement plans.

“By collecting data about existing inpatient and outpatient operations and modeling scenarios that utilized potential process improvements from our new command center, we clarified how the command center should function to have the most impact,” said Sanjay Pattani, MD, MHSA, FACEP, VP and Associate Chief Medical Officer, Mission Control and Attending, Emergency Medicine at AdventHealth[2].

A tool fit for the job

When healthcare executives are making high-stakes decisions about their organization’s capacity strategy, they need the ability to access and evaluate future scenarios based on accurate projections. During a project that typically lasts about five months, the GE HealthCare Command Center team works with stakeholders across the healthcare organization to develop a sophisticated Digital Twin. This multi-variate and expedient scenario planning process enables quick and effective testing of facility and performance initiatives. Then, the team generates data-driven recommendations for optimizing patient care capacity utilization, capital investment, and operational efficiency.

As a result, divergent stakeholders can visualize tradeoffs and have a common understanding of the outcomes of each scenario. This methodology helps healthcare leaders make better-informed decisions, and hospitals around the world continue to return to this approach to drive better capacity planning and improve patient flow.

To learn more about how the GE HealthCare Command Center team uses Digital Twin technology, check out the Executive Brief “Capacity Strategy Powered by a Digital Twin: Examining Use Case Scenarios.”

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