Key INFORMS exhibitor and presentation

With only a few weeks left until INFORMS 2011 healthcare event in Montreal. As one of the main exhibitors and presenters, we here at Visual8 are busy putting the final touches to our simulation in healthcare key presentation. While we plan to have plenty of informative healthcare simulation at our booth this year at INFORMS Healthcare 2011. We would like to provide you with some healthcare simulation information just to tide you over until INFORMS healthcare 2011 begins.

Please take the time to watch our little simulation in healthcare video and take a moment to browse our healthcare simulation solutions for more detail on how simulation software is assisting healthcare providers across the globe optimize resources, better integrate services, and save money.

Left unchecked, heath care spending will consume 100% of our provincial program spending budget within 10 to 15 years.

- CFO Nova Scotia Dept of Health

Kieran Concannon, CEO of Visual8, to demonstrate Scenario Generator – Monday June 13, 12:30pm

Visual8 and the Centre for Research in Healthcare Engineering invite you to attend a series of healthcare optimization seminars at the University of Toronto.

As the population gets older, and technology is more expensive, the cost of health and social care is going up and new techniques are needed to understand the most effective and affordable interventions to meet the health and social care needs of the population.

Healthcare Simulation techniques model health and social care systems to enable planners, clinicians, analysts and managers to understand the most efficient and effective way of planning a service, taking into account variability and changes in demand and informing evidence-based decision-making.

Scenario Generator is the first and only simulation software tool for strategic planning that enables design and simulation of care pathways within whole health and social care systems. This supports strategic decision-making and the planning, commissioning and design of new models of care.

Scenario Generator has been developed through a public-private partnership between SIMUL8 Corporation, the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement and a number of NHS and local government partners in the UK.

Scenario Generator is designed to:

• Replicate the existing service configuration and care pathways in a health and social care system
• Enable scenarios to be developed that reflect changes in population, prevalence, service configuration and capacity, and models of care
• Simulate scenarios to examine the impact of those changes on flow, capacity, end-to-end transaction times (including delays and waits) and cost across the whole system
• Indicate where changes to one pathway might have impacts elsewhere in the whole system

An initiative of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, the Centre for Research in Healthcare Engineering (CRHE) is a response to the immediate and compelling desire for efficiency and quality improvements in the Canadian health care system. CRHE research is focused on the application of Industrial/Systems Engineering techniques in relation to demand and capacity modeling and resource allocation issues in the health care industry. Its goals include creating quantitative decision support tools to help policy makers and industry leaders make better informed decisions.

Visual8 and CRHE have successfully partnered together on several health care simulation projects. As a leader in the use of computer modeling and simulation, Visual8’s valuable support has contributed directly to CRHE’s success. Sample projects include:

Perioperative DSS Patient Flow Analysis

This simulation models the operating rooms of a hospital, as well as all of the processes and procedures that support the OR. It can be used as a tactical tool to evaluate OR procedures in hospitals across Ontario in support of the provincial and national wait time initiatives. Based on the simulation results, perioperative managers can optimize their strategic decisions to minimize the negative impact of such measures on the entire perioperative process.

Read more about Visual8′s Perioperative Patient Flow Analysis project

Healthcare Initiative Learning Interface

This tool allows the user to examine the impact of a set of widely acknowledged yet often misunderstood hospital efficiency initiatives. These include segmenting capacity in the ED, managing wait-lists, and matching resource capacity to demand. The results of the simulation help underline the impact that these initiatives can have on wait times.

Read more about Visual8′s healthcare initiative learning interface project

Visual8 is pleased to be an exhibitor at the upcoming INFORMS Healthcare 2011, June 20-22 in Montreal, Canada. Stop by our booth to see a live demonstration of Scenario Generator as well as a number of other Healthcare Decision Support Systems.

About INFORMS

INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) is a society formed of professionals in the fields of operations research, business analytics and other management sciences. Serving as a focal point for operations research employees and academics INFORMS assists in the communication of ideas between professionals and researchers alike.

INFORMS Healthcare Conference 2011

The INFORMS Healthcare conference provides attendees with an invaluable opportunity to learn from and network with fellow operations research and healthcare professionals. As active members in the healthcare simulation community Visual8 will be attending INFORMS 2011 providing visitors with an opportunity to discuss Visual8 Healthcare Simulation Projects and Decision Support Solutions with members of the Visual8 consulting team.

SIMUL8 Corporation took a step towards expanding its position in the Canadian healthcare market today by signing a partnership agreement with Visual8 Corporation to become a distributor of SIMUL8’s Scenario Generator software in Canada.

Scenario Generator is a user-friendly visual simulation software system that enables healthcare, social services and other public sector agencies and private sector organizations to explore real life scenarios in a risk free environment. Using statistically accurate results, users can select options for change based on conclusive evidence of what benefits their organization the most. Scenario Generator software is embedded with up-to-date population and disease prevalence data, enabling users to gain actual insight and appreciation of the risks, impact and benefits of existing and future options for change which support strategic and operational decision-making. Using Scenario Generator enables testing of many different scenarios generating the data necessary to support evidence-based decision making.

From cost savings to improvements in patient care, the software is currently used by health and human service systems worldwide. Visual8 will be the first external distributor of Scenario Generator. Dr Eileen Pepler, a world leading scholar and consultant on health and social service sector reform particularly with respect to patient centered and social service delivery systems, will be working with Visual8, using her experience with Scenario Generator to promote its benefits in the Canadian market. “With over a decade of collaboration between our companies, Visual8 is an obvious choice to provide Scenario Generator training and solutions to Canada, and with Dr. Pepler’s knowledge and expertise, they are offering a powerful solution,” says SIMUL8 Lead for Healthcare, Claire Cordeaux. “The timing couldn’t be better with the release of Scenario Generator 4.0 this month.”

In the new release, Scenario Generator includes for the first time clinical and service pathways, pre-populated with health and social care prevalence data, and health and human services cost data. The new software release includes features to allow for the evaluation, through sophisticated simulation techniques, of the impact of demand on services and resources, and the effect of changes to service configuration. The software is designed to allow services to easily and securely share data across public sector agencies who participate in the delivery of services leading to joined-up data for measuring outcomes.

The Canadian healthcare market is in urgent need of new tools that can help address the complex issues around service delivery and identify improvements on a number of levels—national, provincial and regional. Scenario Generator provides health and social care professionals with a powerful decision-making tool to assess where and how our healthcare dollars can be better spent by aligning resources to meet demand aimed at improving access, reducing waiting times and managing budgetary constraints

- Kieran Concannon, Visual8 CEO