ProMoBed: Hospital Capacity Model

Healthcare is an everchanging environment, where currently some of the most important trends are an ageing population and a shift towards chronic diseases. These trends result in growing costs and have forced governments to cut in healthcare budgets and initiate reforms. In this setting of reduced budget, hospitals have to make very conscious and well-thought decisions when investing by properly assessing the required size of their (future) hospital in terms of beds, nursing, amount of operating theatres, etc.

Healthcare – a complex & changing environment

To illustrate the complexity of such decision making, it suffices to indicate some impacting parameters. This is the case with the upcoming network formation in Belgium, but also with the shift towards home care, the reducing length of stay of most treatments or the changes in population, epidemiology and technology.

A tool which predicts this required (bed) capacity over long-term periods is currently lacking for hospital direction. Our innovative solution, ProMoBed, is able to accurately derive these long-term predictions by using a specific simulation approach where multiple parameters, such as demographic changes, epidemiological and technical evolutions, will be used to get a solid, predictive model. ProMoBed is co-developed with our project partner IMEC, feeding our solution with their in-depth experience in data analysis and expertise in simulation methodologies.

Our Approach

Based on both quantitative and qualitative inputs, ProMoBed allows for detailed care demand and capacity estimation, including the possibility of “what-if” analyses (See figure below). On the input side, we use a thorough literature study to investigate the impact and correlations between different demographic parameters and geographic settings, the number of admissions and the length of stay. These parameters are linked to both historical as well as hospital-specific data and are validated by experts and are fed in our simulation model. By doing so, we are able to forecast the future care demand for our hospital or network of hospitals and to simulate the required capacity in order to fulfill this future demand.

To illustrate the practical benefits of the ProMoBed solution, we hereby give some concrete examples of added-value:

• A hospital needs to renovate the geriatrics department and needs to decide to add extra rooms for elderly patients or reduce the size of the ward. ProMoBed will present an impact frame to take the right decision, through a mix of evolution in demographics, home care collaboration and specific epidemiology evolution.
• Two hospitals want to collaborate in a network and optimize the cardiology department. Current size and data will be input in the ProMoBed tool, the different correlation data for chronic diseases, combined with local, regional evolutions, will give insight in the evolutions the coming 10 to 15 years.

Contact the projectmanager: Pieter Vanleenhove

Read his LinkedIn article on ProMoBed here

or read the academic abstract below: