A patient planning and tracking system for a cardiac surgery department

Patients undergoing cardiac surgery occupy a cascade of beds during their stay in hospital. The length of stay at each sub-department depends on many factors such as the condition of the patient, the performed therapeutic procedure and the attending staff. The patient throughput therefore may be hampered in many ways and is subject to vast communication processes in which copying of information is a substantial component. In order to optimize this throughput a software package has been developed based on a computer model predicting the average stay of a patient on each sub-department, given the surgical procedure and his clinical condition. This way the overall flow of patients can be predicted and potential problems in patient logistics can be foreseen. Furthermore sharing of information will reduce the workload and the number of misinterpretations.